An example of color digital infrared photography. The camera's infrared blocking filter has been removed.
You can see the "normal" visible light colors in the parts of the scene that aren't highly IR reflective like the sky and some of the stone. From the same Wikipedia page, here is a picture from a camera that is setup as you describe. Note the complete absence of blue in the sky.
This scene I originally linked looks very similar to "night vision" security cameras that use IR illuminators and have no IR cut filter for daytime. Highly NIR reflective objects look white, but otherwise somewhat accurate color is retained.
They put IR filters on cameras for the specific reason of making the images not look like crap. Without an IR filter in place, many of the colors are screwed up and that generally makes people unhappy.
Here's an example picture from a camera with the IR filter removed. Don't get me wrong, it looks super cool, but it also illustrates that keeping people from seeing through clothes is not the main reason that CCD cameras have IR filters.
Most if those don't look like they'd be used (or useful) for spying. They look like they're for communicating with the host country directly (not through local infrastructure). Most of them are satcom dishes and HF antennae for long distance communication.
I think the most important aspect is that the right people (or the right kind of people) are making money off it. If connected people are profiting from it, anything is legal.
Have you ever listened to his speech? His dream was of a world where we weren't all talking about racism. He dreamed of a world where every damned issue didn't come down to the color of someone's skin.
I'm not saying that we've eradicated racism (or sexism), but making every situation about race (or gender) and oppression and victimhood isn't the solution. We've made some serious progress since his time and this obsession with finding an easy (and wrong) cause to blame every problem on is only slowing our progress.
Morgan Freeman wasn't talking about silencing necessary discussion about racism. He was talking about not forcing everything into the box of racism, no matter how poorly it fits.
It's far from perfect, but at least Google are trying to do something and it's better than the current status quo.
I don't see how this really follows. There is lots that Google could be doing right now, without some new encryption project, that they aren't doing. For example, play around with "openssl s_client" and try connecting to Google's servers. They automatically degrade the cipher used to the weakest cipher that the client will allow (bottoming out at RC4-MD5, it seems). I know that's a fast cipher that has good hardware accelerators available, but they could raise their lower limit or use the strongest common cipher by default.
This just seem like a lot of talk, when their actions don't back it up.
Besides being gibberish, I don't think they used the word "servers" on accident. However sound the encryption is, expect it to be deployed as a big star network with Google's servers in the middle. What benefit does Google gain from making traffic hidden from their prying eyes?
I don't like it when people go duck hunting without being careful not to point their weapons anywhere near a family cruising along in their Cessna.
Unless that Cessna is flying extremely close (~50 m) to the ground, anyone hunting duck won't be able to hurt it. Birdshot loses velocity to air resistance very quickly. If they are going to fly that low, they really ought to avoid areas where people are shooting into the air.
We discussed this the last time this article came up. You're not going to hit a drone with a shotgun and shooting into the air with a solid bullet is stupid and dangerous (and you'll have a ridiculous time hitting an aircraft, anyway). This whole drone hunting license is half joke and half protest.
Because that world would never come to be. What we'd have is certain people being completely transparent and other, more privileged, people having privacy. All of the shady stuff that happens today would continue to happen in private, but everyone would also know about every BM you made.
Well, the Constitution describes the right to bear arms, not guns (though guns are arms, so his argument is fine). We've had arms of one sort or another since the beginning of our history.
Also, the ninth and tenth amendments make it clear that the Constitution isn't granting rights to the citizens, but delegating powers to the government.
Well, I was thinking more about smart cards, USB tokens, and generally what is covered by PKCS #11 than TPM. There's no reason to use TPM for this, and it has the additional downside of being tied to a single computer and not a single user.
PKCS is implemented in the browser and/or the OS, so you wouldn't need to rely on some sites's javascript to render the decoded text. The idea behind it is good, but the implementation is horrible. The fact that it's been around for 20 years and nobody really uses it or knows what it is is a testament to how poorly designed it was.
One solution to quite a few of these problems is a USB dongle that holds the keys and handles the actual encryption. This would be perfectly feasible with PKCS #11, if it didn't suck so very much. HSM and smart cards are so incredibly disappointing in that the potential is squandered by a poorly designed API, massive fragmentation, and the overabundance of not-interoperable devices.
Fixing that mess would go a long way toward making key management simpler and more secure.
They're all looking up, though, which would indicate that the camera is below the screen. Every setup I've seen puts the camera atop the screen, which makes more sense with regards to eye contact as the contact's eyes will be closer to the camera (and filming from slightly above is more flattering than filming from slightly below).
I've done a little video chatting and it never looks as dramatically awkward as the pictures they show. You can tell that the other person is looking at the screen and not the camera, but it isn't as exaggerated as it appears in their setup. If you drag the window as close as you can to the camera, the situation gets much better.
Treason is a very useful concept that has a very specific definition and applicability.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
The quintessential US traitor, Benedict Arnold delivered troop strength and locations to the enemy during an actual war. I'd say that is a pretty clear example of treason.
If you use that example to draw your line, nothing Snowden has released to date gets anywhere near it. You could perhaps make a case for espionage, but this doesn't look like treason at all. If Snowden went to Afghanistan and started telling the enemy where US troops were, that would cross your line. Treason involves actually waging war against the US or conspiring with the enemy of the US. Exposing state secrets (of dubious legality, or that are simply embarrassing) is pretty hard to construe as "levying War against [the United States]," and only in the most vague and meaningless way, "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
.
I said that you were implying that he committed treason because your post reads as though you feel he's crossed that line long ago and you're wondering what it will take for his dim-witted supporters to finally reach that conclusion. It seems like "asking a question" in the way that talk radio guy (whose name I can't remember for the life of me right now) "only asks questions".
I'm no Snowden Supporter, but I do appreciate having this dirty laundry aired so that we can finally start making real steps toward having a less abusive government. If we make telling the US citizens what their government is doing treason, then it will take longer than decades for us to leash this beast.
SpiderOak is US based, closed source, and their "zero knowledge" implementation is not technical, but policy based. (Who knows, but the fact that they're not sweating the NSA thing like Lavabit and Silent Circle may indicate that they're already cooperating.)
They may be fine, but there's no way for you to know for certain. Any all-in-one (especially closed source) solution is going to require putting all of your trust in an opaque third party. You're better off with a layered approach.
And yet you start this thread by implying that even letting the people know of the extent of the abuse is treason. How well do any of your solutions to make the agencies less abusive over time work if the abuse itself is kept secret from the people that are supposed to be motivating the change?
Because if I pursue the first three options, I'll be probably be around (and still profitable) after next quarter.
To turn it around, why do I want you to invest in my company if you're going to bail after one quarter or pull your investment after one poor quarter? Maximizing shareholder returns is not a successful long-term strategy for profitability.
I genuinely don't know which of you is right and I'm mildly curious (but not enough to research is myself).
That said, in internet debates you don't refute unsubstantiated assertions with more unsubstantiated assertions. Take the time to at least find one reference and back up your claim before you hit post. If you don't do that, your post carries no more weight than the post you're "refuting".
Repeatedly seeing this here makes me die a little inside. From the outside your argument looks like: "Uh-huh", "Nuh-uh" over and over again. We should be better than that here.
A military coup d'état is exactly overthrowing a government using lethal force. Their government was deposed under the imminent threat of overwhelming violence. That's exactly what the GP was referring to.
The protests were nice, and may have motivated the military, but the protests didn't get rid of the dictator. The guys with the guns did that part.
It doesn't have to make sense. It just needs to be continually repeated by the media to work. Fridge logic never seems to kick in over here (or anywhere?).
I've noticed that NPR has been shockingly pro-government and unwilling to do anything but voice total support for US government policies since at least 2009 (maybe earlier). At the time it seemed like a stark transition, but it has been certainly getting even more propaganda-ish since then. All of their interviews now seem to be like the one you described: taking every official statement at face value and only ever asking softball questions.
I can't stand to listen to it anymore; I can feel it killing brain cells.
File sharing and peer to peer copyright infringement (what Dotcom was allegedly facilitating) don't raise funds for anybody. Selling bootleg movies on the street may fund terrorism, but the copyright infringement happening on Bittorrent and Megaupload isn't commercial in nature and there's no money changing hands at all. It's like saying smiling at people funds terrorism; it's a completely absurd statement.
He's a year into his second term and he's still vigorously defending it. He's using his untouchable second term to tighten the screws on the citizens, not defy Congress or his party.
I think it's because marijuana legalization is emerging as a modern states rights issue and he needs to show that all power lies with the federal government. Even if the states legalize something, the federal agents can come in and make things hard for that state's citizens.
There's probably also a budgetary consideration. Marijuana makes up a huge percentage of what the DEA concerns itself with. Legalizing it cuts into the need for agents and supplies, and shrinks a very profitable federal policing agency.
Overall, I doubt it has much to do with marijuana itself.
Look at his most vocal supporters during the elections and at the people who still support him now. The ones I know who still have Obama bumper stickers on their car and storm out of the room when we discuss drone bombings and warrantless wiretapping (or start yelling, "But Bush...") self identify as progressives. Who supports Obama now, except progressives? Even though his policies are not at all progressive. Cue the GP's post about the reality gap...
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The caption for that picture reads:
An example of color digital infrared photography. The camera's infrared blocking filter has been removed.
You can see the "normal" visible light colors in the parts of the scene that aren't highly IR reflective like the sky and some of the stone. From the same Wikipedia page, here is a picture from a camera that is setup as you describe. Note the complete absence of blue in the sky.
This scene I originally linked looks very similar to "night vision" security cameras that use IR illuminators and have no IR cut filter for daytime. Highly NIR reflective objects look white, but otherwise somewhat accurate color is retained.
They put IR filters on cameras for the specific reason of making the images not look like crap. Without an IR filter in place, many of the colors are screwed up and that generally makes people unhappy.
Here's an example picture from a camera with the IR filter removed. Don't get me wrong, it looks super cool, but it also illustrates that keeping people from seeing through clothes is not the main reason that CCD cameras have IR filters.
Most if those don't look like they'd be used (or useful) for spying. They look like they're for communicating with the host country directly (not through local infrastructure). Most of them are satcom dishes and HF antennae for long distance communication.
I think the most important aspect is that the right people (or the right kind of people) are making money off it. If connected people are profiting from it, anything is legal.
Have you ever listened to his speech? His dream was of a world where we weren't all talking about racism. He dreamed of a world where every damned issue didn't come down to the color of someone's skin.
I'm not saying that we've eradicated racism (or sexism), but making every situation about race (or gender) and oppression and victimhood isn't the solution. We've made some serious progress since his time and this obsession with finding an easy (and wrong) cause to blame every problem on is only slowing our progress.
Morgan Freeman wasn't talking about silencing necessary discussion about racism. He was talking about not forcing everything into the box of racism, no matter how poorly it fits.
It's far from perfect, but at least Google are trying to do something and it's better than the current status quo.
I don't see how this really follows. There is lots that Google could be doing right now, without some new encryption project, that they aren't doing. For example, play around with "openssl s_client" and try connecting to Google's servers. They automatically degrade the cipher used to the weakest cipher that the client will allow (bottoming out at RC4-MD5, it seems). I know that's a fast cipher that has good hardware accelerators available, but they could raise their lower limit or use the strongest common cipher by default.
This just seem like a lot of talk, when their actions don't back it up.
Besides being gibberish, I don't think they used the word "servers" on accident. However sound the encryption is, expect it to be deployed as a big star network with Google's servers in the middle. What benefit does Google gain from making traffic hidden from their prying eyes?
I don't like it when people go duck hunting without being careful not to point their weapons anywhere near a family cruising along in their Cessna.
Unless that Cessna is flying extremely close (~50 m) to the ground, anyone hunting duck won't be able to hurt it. Birdshot loses velocity to air resistance very quickly. If they are going to fly that low, they really ought to avoid areas where people are shooting into the air.
We discussed this the last time this article came up. You're not going to hit a drone with a shotgun and shooting into the air with a solid bullet is stupid and dangerous (and you'll have a ridiculous time hitting an aircraft, anyway). This whole drone hunting license is half joke and half protest.
Because that world would never come to be. What we'd have is certain people being completely transparent and other, more privileged, people having privacy. All of the shady stuff that happens today would continue to happen in private, but everyone would also know about every BM you made.
Well, the Constitution describes the right to bear arms, not guns (though guns are arms, so his argument is fine). We've had arms of one sort or another since the beginning of our history.
Also, the ninth and tenth amendments make it clear that the Constitution isn't granting rights to the citizens, but delegating powers to the government.
Well, I was thinking more about smart cards, USB tokens, and generally what is covered by PKCS #11 than TPM. There's no reason to use TPM for this, and it has the additional downside of being tied to a single computer and not a single user.
PKCS is implemented in the browser and/or the OS, so you wouldn't need to rely on some sites's javascript to render the decoded text. The idea behind it is good, but the implementation is horrible. The fact that it's been around for 20 years and nobody really uses it or knows what it is is a testament to how poorly designed it was.
One solution to quite a few of these problems is a USB dongle that holds the keys and handles the actual encryption. This would be perfectly feasible with PKCS #11, if it didn't suck so very much. HSM and smart cards are so incredibly disappointing in that the potential is squandered by a poorly designed API, massive fragmentation, and the overabundance of not-interoperable devices.
Fixing that mess would go a long way toward making key management simpler and more secure.
They're all looking up, though, which would indicate that the camera is below the screen. Every setup I've seen puts the camera atop the screen, which makes more sense with regards to eye contact as the contact's eyes will be closer to the camera (and filming from slightly above is more flattering than filming from slightly below).
I've done a little video chatting and it never looks as dramatically awkward as the pictures they show. You can tell that the other person is looking at the screen and not the camera, but it isn't as exaggerated as it appears in their setup. If you drag the window as close as you can to the camera, the situation gets much better.
Treason is a very useful concept that has a very specific definition and applicability.
The quintessential US traitor, Benedict Arnold delivered troop strength and locations to the enemy during an actual war. I'd say that is a pretty clear example of treason.
If you use that example to draw your line, nothing Snowden has released to date gets anywhere near it. You could perhaps make a case for espionage, but this doesn't look like treason at all. If Snowden went to Afghanistan and started telling the enemy where US troops were, that would cross your line. Treason involves actually waging war against the US or conspiring with the enemy of the US. Exposing state secrets (of dubious legality, or that are simply embarrassing) is pretty hard to construe as "levying War against [the United States]," and only in the most vague and meaningless way, "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
.
I said that you were implying that he committed treason because your post reads as though you feel he's crossed that line long ago and you're wondering what it will take for his dim-witted supporters to finally reach that conclusion. It seems like "asking a question" in the way that talk radio guy (whose name I can't remember for the life of me right now) "only asks questions".
I'm no Snowden Supporter, but I do appreciate having this dirty laundry aired so that we can finally start making real steps toward having a less abusive government. If we make telling the US citizens what their government is doing treason, then it will take longer than decades for us to leash this beast.
SpiderOak is US based, closed source, and their "zero knowledge" implementation is not technical, but policy based. (Who knows, but the fact that they're not sweating the NSA thing like Lavabit and Silent Circle may indicate that they're already cooperating.)
They may be fine, but there's no way for you to know for certain. Any all-in-one (especially closed source) solution is going to require putting all of your trust in an opaque third party. You're better off with a layered approach.
And yet you start this thread by implying that even letting the people know of the extent of the abuse is treason. How well do any of your solutions to make the agencies less abusive over time work if the abuse itself is kept secret from the people that are supposed to be motivating the change?
Because if I pursue the first three options, I'll be probably be around (and still profitable) after next quarter.
To turn it around, why do I want you to invest in my company if you're going to bail after one quarter or pull your investment after one poor quarter? Maximizing shareholder returns is not a successful long-term strategy for profitability.
I genuinely don't know which of you is right and I'm mildly curious (but not enough to research is myself).
That said, in internet debates you don't refute unsubstantiated assertions with more unsubstantiated assertions. Take the time to at least find one reference and back up your claim before you hit post. If you don't do that, your post carries no more weight than the post you're "refuting".
Repeatedly seeing this here makes me die a little inside. From the outside your argument looks like: "Uh-huh", "Nuh-uh" over and over again. We should be better than that here.
A military coup d'état is exactly overthrowing a government using lethal force. Their government was deposed under the imminent threat of overwhelming violence. That's exactly what the GP was referring to.
The protests were nice, and may have motivated the military, but the protests didn't get rid of the dictator. The guys with the guns did that part.
Why would he go public if he was a spy?
It doesn't have to make sense. It just needs to be continually repeated by the media to work. Fridge logic never seems to kick in over here (or anywhere?).
I've noticed that NPR has been shockingly pro-government and unwilling to do anything but voice total support for US government policies since at least 2009 (maybe earlier). At the time it seemed like a stark transition, but it has been certainly getting even more propaganda-ish since then. All of their interviews now seem to be like the one you described: taking every official statement at face value and only ever asking softball questions.
I can't stand to listen to it anymore; I can feel it killing brain cells.
File sharing and peer to peer copyright infringement (what Dotcom was allegedly facilitating) don't raise funds for anybody. Selling bootleg movies on the street may fund terrorism, but the copyright infringement happening on Bittorrent and Megaupload isn't commercial in nature and there's no money changing hands at all. It's like saying smiling at people funds terrorism; it's a completely absurd statement.
Now he can... in his second term yet...
He's a year into his second term and he's still vigorously defending it. He's using his untouchable second term to tighten the screws on the citizens, not defy Congress or his party.
I think it's because marijuana legalization is emerging as a modern states rights issue and he needs to show that all power lies with the federal government. Even if the states legalize something, the federal agents can come in and make things hard for that state's citizens.
There's probably also a budgetary consideration. Marijuana makes up a huge percentage of what the DEA concerns itself with. Legalizing it cuts into the need for agents and supplies, and shrinks a very profitable federal policing agency.
Overall, I doubt it has much to do with marijuana itself.
Look at his most vocal supporters during the elections and at the people who still support him now. The ones I know who still have Obama bumper stickers on their car and storm out of the room when we discuss drone bombings and warrantless wiretapping (or start yelling, "But Bush...") self identify as progressives. Who supports Obama now, except progressives? Even though his policies are not at all progressive. Cue the GP's post about the reality gap...
Or are you going to pull a No True Scotsman here?