Wow. That is some weapons-grade crazy you're spouting there. Read the wiki article he linked; it's actually quite good and informative. Peel's ideas here are pretty cool, and are not at all about enabling a coercive authority. It doesn't seem to me that modern western police uniformly follow these principles, though I wish they did.
If you're arguing that government should not have any powers of enforcement, you should really work on your argument. Also, "appeal to authority" refers to the logical fallacy "in which a rhetor seeks to persuade not by giving evidence but by appealing to the respect people have for the famous." I think Inigo Montoya has something to say to you about that.
She works with cops. All of her otherwise spot-on insight goes completely out the window when the discussion shifts to law enforcement. It's the cognitive dissonance one must have to work with monsters and still maintain that you are not a monster.
The cops she works with are probably OK guys to her. They're OK guys to each other, too. But then, Mafia thugs drink and play cards together as well. How a group treats its own is not the measure of how good the members are, especially when they can ruin the lives of others without any consequences.
...Or we could just operate within a system that provides transparency and oversight. I don't implicitly trust most people, but I'm still able to participate in civilization and conduct business with others. A system that demands absolute trust in strangers (especially strangers with authority over you) is just as unworkable as your roving bands of vigilantes.
An open outbound port 25 is a source of spam. An open inbound port 25 only stops personal mailservers. ISPs have always blocked outbound port 25, but they are now starting to block inbound port 25 as well. This isn't about spam.
Unfiltered inbound port 25 along with an ISP provided authenticated relay is the most common way of running personal mailservers on residential services. It's not a source of spam and has been left alone until quite recently.
Add in the fact that any encounter with our contemporary police forces has a non-negligible chance of becoming lethal (especially when they are coming to your home with rifles and body armor), and the problem is especially highlighted. Some people get, "See, you had nothing to hide. No big deal," but others get shot, and some only have their dog killed and their home trashed. Ultimately, which one of those scenarios plays out has very little correlation with the guilt of the citizen.
These risks are too high to be subjecting large swaths of innocent people to.
I think it's interesting that they talked to the people at all, even though they showed up looking like they weren't there to talk.
I just rewatched War Games the other day and had to laugh at the way the FBI was portrayed apprehending Broderick. They were supposed to look all intimidating, but they seemed so polite compared to how such an operation would go down today. His dog survived the operation, his parents weren't pissing themselves on the floor at gunpoint, there was no profanity yelled at anyone. And he was a national security threat.
I know it's a technicality, but unconstitutional laws are unconstitutional from the day that they are passed. While it takes an act of the Judiciary to officially recognize that they are unconstitutional, the courts have recognized that there is never any reason to obey an unconstitutional law. Since the Constitution is meant to be interpreted by the citizens that give the government its authority, I'd say that we are all capable of determining the constitutionality of a law, legal degree or not.
It was established in case law dating to 1886 (Norton v. Shelby County) that an unconstitutional act is void “ab initio” i.e. the moment it is signed into “law.” As stated in that case: “An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection, it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.”
He looks pretty clean cut; that seems to go a long way with the police. From his history, it seems like the local police and him have a pretty intimate (and not adversarial) relationship. I think that helps quite a bit, too.
Repeat the situation with a mass-media stereotypical "hacker" and it would probably fit your description a little closer.
The problem I'm encountering is that everybody I know uses webmail (ick). There are some plugins for GPG on webmail, but they seem to have been in a net yet usable state for a while.
I just don't understand what their endgame is. For every example of sustained Robber Baron periods there are countless examples of violent revolution or coup. When you already own most of everything, why push your luck for that last little drop?
If you engage in a bunch of communist nonsense to devalue the work of doctors, people will stop becoming doctors for the money.
Yeah, my father is a professor at a medical school and he's been watching the decline of the quality of student for a while. While the students do well enough in the classes and are all extremely competitive, he says that he sees fewer students every year that have a real passion for medicine. The thing that really seems to pique their interest is any discussion of how much money they'll be making.
It seems to me that an interest in medicine, let alone a real passion for it, is not even remotely a qualification for becoming a doctor. In fact, many of the truly passionate applicants are previous nurses, EMTs, and the likes and they're often not competitive enough (on paper) to get in to med school.
All throughout history people have paid for their own oppression. That's the recurring theme. We have some psychological weakness for ambitious sociopaths and we let them maneuver us into this position time and time again. It happens on a small scale with con men and on a large scale with governments.
Our "rulers" are completely and totally dependent on us. All of the power that they wield over us comes directly from ourselves. If we all decided tomorrow that we've had enough of this crap, they'd be starving in their little castles and we'd be no worse off. They don't actually contribute anything positive to the whole system, they're just parasites that use some of us against the others.
We've always paid for our own oppression, because we are the only ones who have anything to pay with. Where exactly would they get the money to pay for this if they didn't take it from us?
Are you not aware that the construct of limited liability corporations predates the existence of the United States? Mercantilism, a European doctrine, was responsible for horrible acts by corporations, including outright wars waged by corporations. Some of the most heinous companies that have ever existed, such as the East India Company and the South Sea Company predate the US as an entity or an economic power. Other more modern atrocities were carried out non-US oil and chemical companies. To conclude that too-powerful corporations are a result of US influence is to be disturbingly ignorant of world history.
But anyway, your country is really your own affair. You can't blame your elected government's policies on the actions of foreign governments. If you don't like the way the US operates, you should stop your government from emulating them.
I didn't realize that interacting with you was going to be such an uncivil and icky process. If you want to relax and continue this discussion without all of the childish names and vitriol, I'll be right here.
You mistakenly assumed my tone. I wasn't attempting to be hostile, I was shocked. I like how you immediately jumped to the juvenile name-calling, though. Classy.
My "rules" are to give attention to things that warrant attention. Are you seriously suggesting that I'm a hypocrite and that everything I say is bogus because I don't think a click-through EULA requires the same attention as a real estate contract?
I just bought a house a few years ago. The contract was 115 pages long and took an hour to read before I went to the closing. I marked anything that I wasn't sure about and asked about it at the closing. Working through the questions and changes took half an hour. Nobody there seemed pissed that I didn't just sign it unread and push it back across the table. They, of course, had already read the contract before they signed it.
The position that you described is a dangerous one, and I feel that it does the world no favors to paint it in a positive light on forums. Contracts are long and boring, and many are stupid and unnecessary (EULAs and dentist copyright assignments), but one should always try to be aware of what is being signed. As shown in this article, blindly signing things can end up biting you. Even if such a contract ends up thrown out in court, the cost and hassle of going to court could be avoided from the start by not signing documents you don't agree with.
You're dealing with some pretty shady folks there. They've always given me the contract to read well before closing and it really only takes an hour or so to read, tops. That's a pretty weak rationalization for your laziness and deliberate ignorance.
You absolutely suspend the negotiations until the terms you're legally agreeing to abide by are actually spelled out in writing. There's quite a bit of money at stake here; how about some freaking due diligence?
Yikes! It's scary that some people actually live their lives this way!
(I mean, I understand clicking through a EULA for a video game or something, but the idea of not reading anything just floors me.)
-i simulates an initial login, so it's more like "sudo su -" in that you get a root shell and all of the.profile and such are read. -s doesn't read those files.
I expect much better from a supposedly geek/tech oriented website. Silly me, right?
This is the site that still doesn't have complete unicode support and only got the support it has very recently. This is the site that still doesn't use HTTPS. This is the site that still doesn't use IPv6. This is the site that actively blocks Tor connections.
I know I'm forgetting a few things, but yes... you're expecting too much. The subject matter may be geeky, but it seems like it's run by a bunch of PHBs (not enough cloud for that, maybe).:(
The pinnacle of modern technology depends on sharing all of your private affairs with the town gossip? You can use everything cool that Google offers without signing in and enabling creepy stalker mode.
You guys all seem to have missed what the article was actually talking about. It's not saying that the CA signing keys are being turned over. It's saying that the private keys from individual web services are being handed over.
Convergence tests for changes in the certificate presented by the web service, which fixes the gaping hole in the CA system whereby any CA can vouch for any server and the browser will implicitly trust the certificate (even if the certificate changes or different people get different certificates).
In the case that this article is discussing, the certificate presented will be identical to the previous certificate, so there is no telltale certificate change to catch. A MitM attack will thus be nearly invisible to the end user (the apparent hostname, IP, and certificate will match what the user expects to see, only latency to the host will change and that's hard to pinpoint). Convergence will not catch a MitM attack that is using the web service's private keys.
PKI isn't over, but the deeply flawed system of everybody trusting a massive list of opaque CAs is (hopefully) over.
The CA system requires that we trust an ever increasing number of governments and companies, and if any one of them is untrustworthy, an attacker can present a legitimate certificate to any end user who isn't keeping track of fingerprints. Some companies, like Google, switch certificates so often, it's impossible to keep track of fingerprints anyway. Every other connection I make to Google uses a different certificate, and my browser doesn't even hesitate to trust them all.
A web of trust is a technically better solution, though I don't think my grandmother would like it, but it's been clear for a long time that the CA system is a joke.
If the private SSL keys are really handed over, convergence won't detect a thing. The man-in-the-middle will be using the exact same keys and the certificates will look identical. Or, the entire session can simply be observed and decrypted on-the-fly. There's no simple and reliable way to detect interception like this.
Mother Theresa didn't die for her principles. She got old and sick and received better treatment than she ever delivered to the patients under her care. If anything, she compromised her principles in the end by seeking so much expensive treatment to ease her suffering and prolong her life.
Gandhi did die for his principles, but it made sense for him to do so because he was the leader of a movement. The movement that he built outlived him and he continued to give it power after death as a martyr. The same can be said for Martin Luther King, Jr. Their deaths cemented the will of their followers.
Snowden isn't the leader of a movement. He doesn't have throngs of followers that are following his guidance. He is a whistle blower, a messenger. His death won't make him a martyr and cement any particular movement, because there is no movement. It makes more sense for him to remain alive and continue the discussion at this point, even if the US government does paint him as an Emmanuel Goldstein of sorts.
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Wow. That is some weapons-grade crazy you're spouting there. Read the wiki article he linked; it's actually quite good and informative. Peel's ideas here are pretty cool, and are not at all about enabling a coercive authority. It doesn't seem to me that modern western police uniformly follow these principles, though I wish they did.
If you're arguing that government should not have any powers of enforcement, you should really work on your argument. Also, "appeal to authority" refers to the logical fallacy "in which a rhetor seeks to persuade not by giving evidence but by appealing to the respect people have for the famous." I think Inigo Montoya has something to say to you about that.
She works with cops. All of her otherwise spot-on insight goes completely out the window when the discussion shifts to law enforcement. It's the cognitive dissonance one must have to work with monsters and still maintain that you are not a monster.
The cops she works with are probably OK guys to her. They're OK guys to each other, too. But then, Mafia thugs drink and play cards together as well. How a group treats its own is not the measure of how good the members are, especially when they can ruin the lives of others without any consequences.
...Or we could just operate within a system that provides transparency and oversight. I don't implicitly trust most people, but I'm still able to participate in civilization and conduct business with others. A system that demands absolute trust in strangers (especially strangers with authority over you) is just as unworkable as your roving bands of vigilantes.
An open outbound port 25 is a source of spam. An open inbound port 25 only stops personal mailservers. ISPs have always blocked outbound port 25, but they are now starting to block inbound port 25 as well. This isn't about spam.
Unfiltered inbound port 25 along with an ISP provided authenticated relay is the most common way of running personal mailservers on residential services. It's not a source of spam and has been left alone until quite recently.
Add in the fact that any encounter with our contemporary police forces has a non-negligible chance of becoming lethal (especially when they are coming to your home with rifles and body armor), and the problem is especially highlighted. Some people get, "See, you had nothing to hide. No big deal," but others get shot, and some only have their dog killed and their home trashed. Ultimately, which one of those scenarios plays out has very little correlation with the guilt of the citizen.
These risks are too high to be subjecting large swaths of innocent people to.
I think it's interesting that they talked to the people at all, even though they showed up looking like they weren't there to talk.
I just rewatched War Games the other day and had to laugh at the way the FBI was portrayed apprehending Broderick. They were supposed to look all intimidating, but they seemed so polite compared to how such an operation would go down today. His dog survived the operation, his parents weren't pissing themselves on the floor at gunpoint, there was no profanity yelled at anyone. And he was a national security threat.
Ah, those were such civilized times.
I know it's a technicality, but unconstitutional laws are unconstitutional from the day that they are passed. While it takes an act of the Judiciary to officially recognize that they are unconstitutional, the courts have recognized that there is never any reason to obey an unconstitutional law. Since the Constitution is meant to be interpreted by the citizens that give the government its authority, I'd say that we are all capable of determining the constitutionality of a law, legal degree or not.
It was established in case law dating to 1886 (Norton v. Shelby County) that an unconstitutional act is void “ab initio” i.e. the moment it is signed into “law.”
As stated in that case: “An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection, it creates no office; it is, in legal contemplation, as inoperative as though it had never been passed.”
He looks pretty clean cut; that seems to go a long way with the police. From his history, it seems like the local police and him have a pretty intimate (and not adversarial) relationship. I think that helps quite a bit, too.
Repeat the situation with a mass-media stereotypical "hacker" and it would probably fit your description a little closer.
The problem I'm encountering is that everybody I know uses webmail (ick). There are some plugins for GPG on webmail, but they seem to have been in a net yet usable state for a while.
I just don't understand what their endgame is. For every example of sustained Robber Baron periods there are countless examples of violent revolution or coup. When you already own most of everything, why push your luck for that last little drop?
If you engage in a bunch of communist nonsense to devalue the work of doctors, people will stop becoming doctors for the money.
Yeah, my father is a professor at a medical school and he's been watching the decline of the quality of student for a while. While the students do well enough in the classes and are all extremely competitive, he says that he sees fewer students every year that have a real passion for medicine. The thing that really seems to pique their interest is any discussion of how much money they'll be making.
It seems to me that an interest in medicine, let alone a real passion for it, is not even remotely a qualification for becoming a doctor. In fact, many of the truly passionate applicants are previous nurses, EMTs, and the likes and they're often not competitive enough (on paper) to get in to med school.
All throughout history people have paid for their own oppression. That's the recurring theme. We have some psychological weakness for ambitious sociopaths and we let them maneuver us into this position time and time again. It happens on a small scale with con men and on a large scale with governments.
Our "rulers" are completely and totally dependent on us. All of the power that they wield over us comes directly from ourselves. If we all decided tomorrow that we've had enough of this crap, they'd be starving in their little castles and we'd be no worse off. They don't actually contribute anything positive to the whole system, they're just parasites that use some of us against the others.
We've always paid for our own oppression, because we are the only ones who have anything to pay with. Where exactly would they get the money to pay for this if they didn't take it from us?
Jail that someone for interfering with fair elections.
Are you not aware that the construct of limited liability corporations predates the existence of the United States? Mercantilism, a European doctrine, was responsible for horrible acts by corporations, including outright wars waged by corporations. Some of the most heinous companies that have ever existed, such as the East India Company and the South Sea Company predate the US as an entity or an economic power. Other more modern atrocities were carried out non-US oil and chemical companies. To conclude that too-powerful corporations are a result of US influence is to be disturbingly ignorant of world history.
But anyway, your country is really your own affair. You can't blame your elected government's policies on the actions of foreign governments. If you don't like the way the US operates, you should stop your government from emulating them.
I imagined your post being spoken by the Simpsons comic book guy.
That voice comes in handy quite a bit here.
I didn't realize that interacting with you was going to be such an uncivil and icky process. If you want to relax and continue this discussion without all of the childish names and vitriol, I'll be right here.
You mistakenly assumed my tone. I wasn't attempting to be hostile, I was shocked. I like how you immediately jumped to the juvenile name-calling, though. Classy.
My "rules" are to give attention to things that warrant attention. Are you seriously suggesting that I'm a hypocrite and that everything I say is bogus because I don't think a click-through EULA requires the same attention as a real estate contract?
I just bought a house a few years ago. The contract was 115 pages long and took an hour to read before I went to the closing. I marked anything that I wasn't sure about and asked about it at the closing. Working through the questions and changes took half an hour. Nobody there seemed pissed that I didn't just sign it unread and push it back across the table. They, of course, had already read the contract before they signed it.
The position that you described is a dangerous one, and I feel that it does the world no favors to paint it in a positive light on forums. Contracts are long and boring, and many are stupid and unnecessary (EULAs and dentist copyright assignments), but one should always try to be aware of what is being signed. As shown in this article, blindly signing things can end up biting you. Even if such a contract ends up thrown out in court, the cost and hassle of going to court could be avoided from the start by not signing documents you don't agree with.
You're dealing with some pretty shady folks there. They've always given me the contract to read well before closing and it really only takes an hour or so to read, tops. That's a pretty weak rationalization for your laziness and deliberate ignorance.
You absolutely suspend the negotiations until the terms you're legally agreeing to abide by are actually spelled out in writing. There's quite a bit of money at stake here; how about some freaking due diligence?
Yikes! It's scary that some people actually live their lives this way!
(I mean, I understand clicking through a EULA for a video game or something, but the idea of not reading anything just floors me.)
-i simulates an initial login, so it's more like "sudo su -" in that you get a root shell and all of the .profile and such are read. -s doesn't read those files.
I expect much better from a supposedly geek/tech oriented website. Silly me, right?
This is the site that still doesn't have complete unicode support and only got the support it has very recently.
This is the site that still doesn't use HTTPS.
This is the site that still doesn't use IPv6.
This is the site that actively blocks Tor connections.
I know I'm forgetting a few things, but yes... you're expecting too much. The subject matter may be geeky, but it seems like it's run by a bunch of PHBs (not enough cloud for that, maybe). :(
The pinnacle of modern technology depends on sharing all of your private affairs with the town gossip? You can use everything cool that Google offers without signing in and enabling creepy stalker mode.
You guys all seem to have missed what the article was actually talking about. It's not saying that the CA signing keys are being turned over. It's saying that the private keys from individual web services are being handed over.
Convergence tests for changes in the certificate presented by the web service, which fixes the gaping hole in the CA system whereby any CA can vouch for any server and the browser will implicitly trust the certificate (even if the certificate changes or different people get different certificates).
In the case that this article is discussing, the certificate presented will be identical to the previous certificate, so there is no telltale certificate change to catch. A MitM attack will thus be nearly invisible to the end user (the apparent hostname, IP, and certificate will match what the user expects to see, only latency to the host will change and that's hard to pinpoint). Convergence will not catch a MitM attack that is using the web service's private keys.
PKI isn't over, but the deeply flawed system of everybody trusting a massive list of opaque CAs is (hopefully) over.
The CA system requires that we trust an ever increasing number of governments and companies, and if any one of them is untrustworthy, an attacker can present a legitimate certificate to any end user who isn't keeping track of fingerprints. Some companies, like Google, switch certificates so often, it's impossible to keep track of fingerprints anyway. Every other connection I make to Google uses a different certificate, and my browser doesn't even hesitate to trust them all.
A web of trust is a technically better solution, though I don't think my grandmother would like it, but it's been clear for a long time that the CA system is a joke.
If the private SSL keys are really handed over, convergence won't detect a thing. The man-in-the-middle will be using the exact same keys and the certificates will look identical. Or, the entire session can simply be observed and decrypted on-the-fly. There's no simple and reliable way to detect interception like this.
Mother Theresa didn't die for her principles. She got old and sick and received better treatment than she ever delivered to the patients under her care. If anything, she compromised her principles in the end by seeking so much expensive treatment to ease her suffering and prolong her life.
Gandhi did die for his principles, but it made sense for him to do so because he was the leader of a movement. The movement that he built outlived him and he continued to give it power after death as a martyr. The same can be said for Martin Luther King, Jr. Their deaths cemented the will of their followers.
Snowden isn't the leader of a movement. He doesn't have throngs of followers that are following his guidance. He is a whistle blower, a messenger. His death won't make him a martyr and cement any particular movement, because there is no movement. It makes more sense for him to remain alive and continue the discussion at this point, even if the US government does paint him as an Emmanuel Goldstein of sorts.