Bingo. There's a big difference between a culture with a history of executing dissidents and one where everybody is raised to prize freedom and the courage to do what's right even at a high personal cost. The Chinese version of Snowden would be more likely to sell secrets to other intelligence agencies or hackers. That our government right away suspected that Snowden did so demonstrates that as a general rule, that would be the expectation.
Damn autocorrect. "Nothing about this is all that serious" should say MYSTERIOUS. Of course it's serious. I need to impose a rule upon myself that I never wrestle with autocorrect before my first cup of coffee.
Your question is strangely phrased. I haven't and wouldn't suggest that China is installing back doors, as that would implicate the Chinese government. Let's back up a bit though so you're with me here.
Have we forgotten all of the articles about router backdoors installed at the factory? Remember the Cisco stories? We already know the NSA installs their back doors at the factory. That's not news. Besides having been told this before, where would it be more feasible to accomplish this? Should we hazard a guess that the NSA manages to conscript an ever-larger legion of freight personnel?
It makes the most sense for them to do their job in a way that involves the fewest people possible. This means that either the compromised firmware is already present in data written to the devices at the factory or somebody very well trusted manages to single-handedly alter millions of units. Well, look at that. We're already at the one feasible possibility.
Now we have two more possibilities to consider. One is that China does not analyze the electronics assembled in their country or doesn't know anything about security. Well, considering that every single attempt to remotely compromise even my personal home router originated in China, and we've also seen article after article about Chinese hackers since some time in 2002, they know security. Our intelligence services would analyze things assembled here for foreign businesses, no doubt, so one more time we've arrived at a single feasible conclusion.
This stuff about America being bad for the NSA's actions is endearing. I would hug every person whose values leads them to think that way because with that one statement (even implied) is an expression of more shared values than many people realize. That attitude honestly inspired affection, in a brotherly love kind of way.
But it's also naive. The NSA is not evil for what they do, and the United States is not the only nation doing it. The US isn't even the only nation who would do it to the extent the NSA does, if possible. The only way that the US is distinguished in this is the NSA managed to do it first. We beat others to the punch. We would be fools to think that any nation does not pursue the means to spy.
If China really seems like such a saint, let's think back to one more piece of old news. I seem to recall a spy plane that crashed in China. Do we really think that they destroyed it and didn't study it, on "scout's honor"? I remember article after article about how China managed to get their hands on nuclear secrets, and that was followed closely by article after article about how the US military was beefing up electronic security.
This stuff has its measure of intrigue, sure, but if you just remember what you've seen in the news then nothing about this is all that serious. In fact, if it weren't for short memories regarding anything political, Americans could have stopped these NSA programs back when George W. Bush explicitly told us on national television that they would soon exist. But that's another topic, for another thread.
I like how they pretend that this was only just revealed to them when so many products by those brands are assembled in China, and the backdoors are installed at the factory (according to recent news). They knew this all along, so they're not doing this for security reasons. They're doing it so that US businesses will pressure the NSA to stop, and then if it succeeds, China will have the upper hand in espionage.
In every other conceivable respect, this isn't funny at all. It's just that they think we'll fall for that, and for the most part, we are. But neither these businesses nor the NSA will. The end result will be that China will start buying these products again and it will be spun to us as the result of some kind of breakthrough negotiation. I give it a year, but they might pull a headline grabber and make it happen sooner if it was primarily a bid for lower prices all along.
There is only one reason anybody would want to ban these weapons. They can not create weaponry to compete. That is a GOOD thing. If people know that there is absolutely zero chance that they can win a war -- if they know that they will not even get the opportunity to actually fight enemy soldiers and they will have to sacrifice blood while their enemy doesn't -- then they will be less likely to go to war. Think of ISIS. Do you think they'd be so keen on starting a war with the West if they understood that the only result will be their annihilation with machines? Do you think their "holy war / jihad" recruitment propaganda would work if there were exactly zero chance that they would so much as get to fire on "infidels"?
I wholeheartedly welcome the development of this technology. And I seriously doubt that any of the nations capable of producing it will allow it to be banned.
You're arguing that we would surely see aliens coming because "there's no stealth in space". We're not talking about your house. We're not talking about a stealth jet. Also...
stealth
stelTH
noun
1.
cautious and surreptitious action or movement.
No, that doesn't make any sense, and I'd like a citation to that theory. Something is stealthed if you don't see it. To not see it requires no more than not looking at it. It is certainly allowable by the laws of physics that we don't look at something.
In fact, to suggest an old theory that says stealth of any kind is impossible not only imagines a theory that doesn't exist, but it violates the very principles of empiricism, thereby undermining the entirety of Physics with every other science to follow.
They're not likely to get here without using some kind of spacetime distortion. FTL doesn't work, but if you warp space just right then there's a loophole. Technically you never go faster than light in your local space.
A side effect of those drives is that they have to be pulsed or they trap cosmic particles that make a mighty explosion when the drive is disengaged. They get trapped in that artificial geodesic. So, no heat, no radiation, nadda to let us know they're coming.
That's why I say they should just destroy the solar system, rather than could. If they're coming in hot, and they really want our resources, they'll just decimate us and mine the remains. We'd never see it coming.
But let's stop and think about this for a moment. Your argument is that they can cross the cosmos, but they can't match the orbital velocity of planets.... They're not very good at crossing the cosmos in your version of this. In fact, if they've so little mastery of space travel, then they're probably in a runaway vessel that they can't control. We're boned then even if they're friendly. Don't break the Alcubierre oscillator, please. If you do, then you did, like, five or six bads at people.
There is most certainly stealth in space. Now, if they get close to Earth before they do anything, then we might get a little warning. A very little warning. But it wouldn't be enough to mount a defense, more than likely. If they made it this far, and they're hostile, then they know not to be detected until they're ready to strike. We're not talking about dummies here. We're talking a species at least as smart as us, having dispatched a mission involving its best and brightest, after meticulously planning every step of the journey and offensive.
Notice that the question isn't about how we'd detect aliens incoming. It's about how we'd detect specifically hostile aliens moving on us with a purpose. We wouldn't. It's that simple.
If they have the technology to get here, then they have the technology to approach such that celestial bodies obscure them. Also, if they have the technology then be glad that they're invading when they should simply destroy the entire solar system instead. Hope they see fit to let our species survive. It's that simple.
I should have thought to type this rather than reply for an addendum. Being able to figure out their strategy with Memex, one might hesitate to post it. We wouldn't want to encourage criminals to try to circumvent it, after all.
Thing is, you can't. That kind of indexing power can even overcome the character limit I mentioned just by doing different checks every n cycles of the program. It's perfectly scalable too. There's no evading it. If a site exists, they will see it, period. And not only sites but everything that can be reached via URL with any protocol they choose to employ.
That's a checkmate when it comes to things like TOR. So, it's hard to imagine why they're reaching for more than Mjornir just to strike a nail. And I guarantee that because we've heard of the Memex tool, it has already been running for some time.
Memex isn't sinister at all. It's a very old idea, and it allows indexing of every possible URL out to some length, in real time. For those who have the resources to run it, that's a pretty nifty device. If they can see every criminal website, then they can obtain warrants for the sites based on their content. At that point, they can seize servers to catch the sites' clients.
Parallel construction is automatically built into that. While they're building a database of website clients, they have probable cause for a warrant to target local machines. If they need another layer, then they can subpoena the ISP.
If we were to be cynical then we could say that they want the use of encryption to qualify as probable cause (they've asked for that), but that's a really, really bad idea. And I don't think that's what this is. I think this is about trying to get in the middle of connections to locate clients and websites at the same time, which suggests either that they're understaffed or that they have no faith in Memex. I'd find it hard to believe that the FBI isn't well-staffed.
People buy those? I hate to say it, but had I known that then I'd already be selling them. That isn't to prey on fears, but stupidity. How hard can it be to braid copper wire? A Faraday cage isn't anything fancy. People *that* easily taken advantage of will be, inevitably. If it's not a wallet Faraday cage then it will be impulse buys at the gas station.
Aren't they at least going to see if Memex works before they try their contingency plan? If they've got that little faith in it, then I hope it was cheap to develop.
That's why I get nervous when somebody talks about what a good driver they are. It's always before they declare their intention to drive drunk or do something else that's approximately just as stupid.
"Dude, what are you doing? If you're going to pass in the right lane, then watch the people on the left and don't do it at rush hour anyway!"
"I'm a great driver, man, don't worry. I do this all the time."
Some time in the future, you hear of them getting severely injured or killed by being a "great driver". You'd think the movie Rainman would have discouraged that kind of thinking.
Or it could be that the absence of a statistically significant increase in motor accidents occurring while the drivers are under the influence of marijuana does not grant the individual driver magical protections against the risks associated with driving intoxicated.
...and driving under the influence of alcohol is most certainly evil. As in, baby-killing evil. As in, running over old women evil. As in, demolishing a stranger's home evil. Literally.
Don't drive when you're intoxicated. There are more risk factors involved than whether or not you have a high tolerance.
When a study is published proving that cannabis intoxication makes you a better driver, and then that study's results are independently reproduced more than once without any conflicts of interest or faults in methodology or analysis, *then* you're not taking a risk with the lives of others. That may never happen. The potential risk is that you can kill people, so you should require more conclusive evidence to back your decision than whether or not you personally think it's okay.
And I say this as somebody who completely agrees with the results of the study. If you drive while stoned, then something isn't right about your capacity for risk/benefit decision-making. By the way, driving too slow can also cause accidents. And driving paranoid can spread your attention when it should be focused on what's important.
You're looking for information that is not present in that metric, by design, and then claiming a fault because it's not there. And in so doing, you could choose many other pieces of information that aren't there to the same effect. It's very clear that they begin by quantifying the alcohol content of the average "drink" because there are so many *kinds* of drink with alcohol that they'd have to write about a spectrum otherwise. They then consider average body weight to arrive at an average blood alcohol level as a function of "drink".
If this were *not* their method then they'd basically be suggesting that if you drank a beer two years ago and another one last month, then you're just as intoxicated as somebody who just slammed two bottles of vodka. If you stop to think about how alcohol intoxication is actually quantified for statutory purposes, then what they actually mean becomes obvious.
So when I'm approached with offers to make more than $10k in a few weeks because I've empirically demonstrated programming skills worth that kind of pay, but I don't get the job because I don't have a degree that cost enough, it's because I'm stupid and lazy? See, the weird thing about that is, I would have thought that spending thousands of hours practicing a cognitively intensive discipline of my own volition, and becoming adept at it, meant exactly the opposite.
I honestly would never have guessed that the words "stupid and lazy" actually mean, "doesn't have parents who can afford to pay ridiculous sums for a scrap of paper, and didn't take on unnecessarily debt." And I'm descended directly from a long line of Lord Baltimores too, so it's not even a matter of pedigree. Maybe if I were smart I'd win the lottery, right?
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Bingo. There's a big difference between a culture with a history of executing dissidents and one where everybody is raised to prize freedom and the courage to do what's right even at a high personal cost. The Chinese version of Snowden would be more likely to sell secrets to other intelligence agencies or hackers. That our government right away suspected that Snowden did so demonstrates that as a general rule, that would be the expectation.
Damn autocorrect. "Nothing about this is all that serious" should say MYSTERIOUS. Of course it's serious. I need to impose a rule upon myself that I never wrestle with autocorrect before my first cup of coffee.
Your question is strangely phrased. I haven't and wouldn't suggest that China is installing back doors, as that would implicate the Chinese government. Let's back up a bit though so you're with me here.
Have we forgotten all of the articles about router backdoors installed at the factory? Remember the Cisco stories? We already know the NSA installs their back doors at the factory. That's not news. Besides having been told this before, where would it be more feasible to accomplish this? Should we hazard a guess that the NSA manages to conscript an ever-larger legion of freight personnel?
It makes the most sense for them to do their job in a way that involves the fewest people possible. This means that either the compromised firmware is already present in data written to the devices at the factory or somebody very well trusted manages to single-handedly alter millions of units. Well, look at that. We're already at the one feasible possibility.
Now we have two more possibilities to consider. One is that China does not analyze the electronics assembled in their country or doesn't know anything about security. Well, considering that every single attempt to remotely compromise even my personal home router originated in China, and we've also seen article after article about Chinese hackers since some time in 2002, they know security. Our intelligence services would analyze things assembled here for foreign businesses, no doubt, so one more time we've arrived at a single feasible conclusion.
This stuff about America being bad for the NSA's actions is endearing. I would hug every person whose values leads them to think that way because with that one statement (even implied) is an expression of more shared values than many people realize. That attitude honestly inspired affection, in a brotherly love kind of way.
But it's also naive. The NSA is not evil for what they do, and the United States is not the only nation doing it. The US isn't even the only nation who would do it to the extent the NSA does, if possible. The only way that the US is distinguished in this is the NSA managed to do it first. We beat others to the punch. We would be fools to think that any nation does not pursue the means to spy.
If China really seems like such a saint, let's think back to one more piece of old news. I seem to recall a spy plane that crashed in China. Do we really think that they destroyed it and didn't study it, on "scout's honor"? I remember article after article about how China managed to get their hands on nuclear secrets, and that was followed closely by article after article about how the US military was beefing up electronic security.
This stuff has its measure of intrigue, sure, but if you just remember what you've seen in the news then nothing about this is all that serious. In fact, if it weren't for short memories regarding anything political, Americans could have stopped these NSA programs back when George W. Bush explicitly told us on national television that they would soon exist. But that's another topic, for another thread.
I like how they pretend that this was only just revealed to them when so many products by those brands are assembled in China, and the backdoors are installed at the factory (according to recent news). They knew this all along, so they're not doing this for security reasons. They're doing it so that US businesses will pressure the NSA to stop, and then if it succeeds, China will have the upper hand in espionage.
In every other conceivable respect, this isn't funny at all. It's just that they think we'll fall for that, and for the most part, we are. But neither these businesses nor the NSA will. The end result will be that China will start buying these products again and it will be spun to us as the result of some kind of breakthrough negotiation. I give it a year, but they might pull a headline grabber and make it happen sooner if it was primarily a bid for lower prices all along.
And risk having to fairly compensate sweatshop workers or at least treat them well? Let's not get crazy here.
The subject of this comment sums it up. He's trying to tick people off so he can be left alone. Either that or he's secretly a major douche bag.
There is only one reason anybody would want to ban these weapons. They can not create weaponry to compete. That is a GOOD thing. If people know that there is absolutely zero chance that they can win a war -- if they know that they will not even get the opportunity to actually fight enemy soldiers and they will have to sacrifice blood while their enemy doesn't -- then they will be less likely to go to war. Think of ISIS. Do you think they'd be so keen on starting a war with the West if they understood that the only result will be their annihilation with machines? Do you think their "holy war / jihad" recruitment propaganda would work if there were exactly zero chance that they would so much as get to fire on "infidels"?
I wholeheartedly welcome the development of this technology. And I seriously doubt that any of the nations capable of producing it will allow it to be banned.
You're arguing that we would surely see aliens coming because "there's no stealth in space". We're not talking about your house. We're not talking about a stealth jet. Also...
stealth
stelTH
noun
1.
cautious and surreptitious action or movement.
No, that doesn't make any sense, and I'd like a citation to that theory. Something is stealthed if you don't see it. To not see it requires no more than not looking at it. It is certainly allowable by the laws of physics that we don't look at something.
In fact, to suggest an old theory that says stealth of any kind is impossible not only imagines a theory that doesn't exist, but it violates the very principles of empiricism, thereby undermining the entirety of Physics with every other science to follow.
They're not likely to get here without using some kind of spacetime distortion. FTL doesn't work, but if you warp space just right then there's a loophole. Technically you never go faster than light in your local space.
... They're not very good at crossing the cosmos in your version of this. In fact, if they've so little mastery of space travel, then they're probably in a runaway vessel that they can't control. We're boned then even if they're friendly. Don't break the Alcubierre oscillator, please. If you do, then you did, like, five or six bads at people.
A side effect of those drives is that they have to be pulsed or they trap cosmic particles that make a mighty explosion when the drive is disengaged. They get trapped in that artificial geodesic. So, no heat, no radiation, nadda to let us know they're coming.
That's why I say they should just destroy the solar system, rather than could. If they're coming in hot, and they really want our resources, they'll just decimate us and mine the remains. We'd never see it coming.
But let's stop and think about this for a moment. Your argument is that they can cross the cosmos, but they can't match the orbital velocity of planets.
There is most certainly stealth in space. Now, if they get close to Earth before they do anything, then we might get a little warning. A very little warning. But it wouldn't be enough to mount a defense, more than likely. If they made it this far, and they're hostile, then they know not to be detected until they're ready to strike. We're not talking about dummies here. We're talking a species at least as smart as us, having dispatched a mission involving its best and brightest, after meticulously planning every step of the journey and offensive.
Notice that the question isn't about how we'd detect aliens incoming. It's about how we'd detect specifically hostile aliens moving on us with a purpose. We wouldn't. It's that simple.
If they have the technology to get here, then they have the technology to approach such that celestial bodies obscure them. Also, if they have the technology then be glad that they're invading when they should simply destroy the entire solar system instead. Hope they see fit to let our species survive. It's that simple.
That's much better than a Faraday cage. But alas, now I shall never know the feeling of walking around with an electromagnetic dead spot on my butt.
I should have thought to type this rather than reply for an addendum. Being able to figure out their strategy with Memex, one might hesitate to post it. We wouldn't want to encourage criminals to try to circumvent it, after all.
Thing is, you can't. That kind of indexing power can even overcome the character limit I mentioned just by doing different checks every n cycles of the program. It's perfectly scalable too. There's no evading it. If a site exists, they will see it, period. And not only sites but everything that can be reached via URL with any protocol they choose to employ.
That's a checkmate when it comes to things like TOR. So, it's hard to imagine why they're reaching for more than Mjornir just to strike a nail. And I guarantee that because we've heard of the Memex tool, it has already been running for some time.
Memex isn't sinister at all. It's a very old idea, and it allows indexing of every possible URL out to some length, in real time. For those who have the resources to run it, that's a pretty nifty device. If they can see every criminal website, then they can obtain warrants for the sites based on their content. At that point, they can seize servers to catch the sites' clients.
Parallel construction is automatically built into that. While they're building a database of website clients, they have probable cause for a warrant to target local machines. If they need another layer, then they can subpoena the ISP.
If we were to be cynical then we could say that they want the use of encryption to qualify as probable cause (they've asked for that), but that's a really, really bad idea. And I don't think that's what this is. I think this is about trying to get in the middle of connections to locate clients and websites at the same time, which suggests either that they're understaffed or that they have no faith in Memex. I'd find it hard to believe that the FBI isn't well-staffed.
People buy those? I hate to say it, but had I known that then I'd already be selling them. That isn't to prey on fears, but stupidity. How hard can it be to braid copper wire? A Faraday cage isn't anything fancy. People *that* easily taken advantage of will be, inevitably. If it's not a wallet Faraday cage then it will be impulse buys at the gas station.
Aren't they at least going to see if Memex works before they try their contingency plan? If they've got that little faith in it, then I hope it was cheap to develop.
Time to make a Faraday Cage wallet.
That's why I get nervous when somebody talks about what a good driver they are. It's always before they declare their intention to drive drunk or do something else that's approximately just as stupid.
"Dude, what are you doing? If you're going to pass in the right lane, then watch the people on the left and don't do it at rush hour anyway!"
"I'm a great driver, man, don't worry. I do this all the time."
Some time in the future, you hear of them getting severely injured or killed by being a "great driver". You'd think the movie Rainman would have discouraged that kind of thinking.
Or it could be that the absence of a statistically significant increase in motor accidents occurring while the drivers are under the influence of marijuana does not grant the individual driver magical protections against the risks associated with driving intoxicated.
...and driving under the influence of alcohol is most certainly evil. As in, baby-killing evil. As in, running over old women evil. As in, demolishing a stranger's home evil. Literally.
People high on pot are also often busy watching out for police when they should be spotting that asshole who just ran a red light.
Don't drive while intoxicated.
Don't drive when you're intoxicated. There are more risk factors involved than whether or not you have a high tolerance.
When a study is published proving that cannabis intoxication makes you a better driver, and then that study's results are independently reproduced more than once without any conflicts of interest or faults in methodology or analysis, *then* you're not taking a risk with the lives of others. That may never happen. The potential risk is that you can kill people, so you should require more conclusive evidence to back your decision than whether or not you personally think it's okay.
And I say this as somebody who completely agrees with the results of the study. If you drive while stoned, then something isn't right about your capacity for risk/benefit decision-making. By the way, driving too slow can also cause accidents. And driving paranoid can spread your attention when it should be focused on what's important.
You're looking for information that is not present in that metric, by design, and then claiming a fault because it's not there. And in so doing, you could choose many other pieces of information that aren't there to the same effect. It's very clear that they begin by quantifying the alcohol content of the average "drink" because there are so many *kinds* of drink with alcohol that they'd have to write about a spectrum otherwise. They then consider average body weight to arrive at an average blood alcohol level as a function of "drink".
If this were *not* their method then they'd basically be suggesting that if you drank a beer two years ago and another one last month, then you're just as intoxicated as somebody who just slammed two bottles of vodka. If you stop to think about how alcohol intoxication is actually quantified for statutory purposes, then what they actually mean becomes obvious.
You no math good, do you?
Oh, just to clarify, by "vacuously interesting," I actually mean, "hopelessly clueless narcissists."
So when I'm approached with offers to make more than $10k in a few weeks because I've empirically demonstrated programming skills worth that kind of pay, but I don't get the job because I don't have a degree that cost enough, it's because I'm stupid and lazy? See, the weird thing about that is, I would have thought that spending thousands of hours practicing a cognitively intensive discipline of my own volition, and becoming adept at it, meant exactly the opposite.
I honestly would never have guessed that the words "stupid and lazy" actually mean, "doesn't have parents who can afford to pay ridiculous sums for a scrap of paper, and didn't take on unnecessarily debt." And I'm descended directly from a long line of Lord Baltimores too, so it's not even a matter of pedigree. Maybe if I were smart I'd win the lottery, right?
Today's snobs are the most vacuously interesting.