I highly doubt this is true. Not one of these companies would want to be a part of a government looking in on another government's information.
You're presuming that they were told that the purpose of this was to be a part of a government looking in on another government's information, or that, even if they were told or could guess it, they weren't in a position of plausible deniability.
I'm pretty sure that they would be good contenders for treason charges if this was true,
Good luck charging Canadian and Finnish companies with treason against the US (unless you're referring to their US subsidiaries).
That being said, if it's going across wires and isn't encrypted, you shouldn't really expect it to be considered safe information.
Exactly. The question is whether the backdoors mentioned in the memo allow tapping of information before it gets encrypted, e.g. a way to intercept ("lawfully" or otherwise) $PROTOCOL-over-SSL traffic.
as most of OS X's core functionality is open source. It's possible for them to hide something in the quartz engine or something,
Or in a non-open-source kernel extension ("kernel loadable module", for the benefit of those who only know Linux terms), if you're talking kernel-based backdoors, or a non-open-source module loaded by open-source userland code, if you're talking about userland backdoors.
(According to the Wikipedia Article) Lawful Interception is when communication providers log connections and keep these logs for 6 months in case they're requested by a Judge.
Offering a backdoor for real-time logging is a completely different thing. A Judge could easily be bypassed with such an interface.
The same applies to splicing into a phone line; a judge can easily be bypassed by a police department or an N Letter Agency just connecting in and listening. I've not seen anything to indicate that the capabilities that RIM, Nokia, Apple, etc. were required to provide were described to the phone suppliers by the Indian government as anything other than lawful intercept capabilities. That doesn't necessarily stop the Indian Directorate General of Military Intelligence (Foreign Division) from using it to snoop on the The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC).
(I've also not seen anything to indicate how the capabilities were described, period; it could have been anything from "we need this to wiretap drug dealers' e-mail" to "we need this to wiretap the U.S. Government's e-mail" to "we need this for our purposes, we don't have to tell you why, you just need to do it if you want to keep selling phones in a market of over 800 million mobile phone users". My money's not on the middle one of those, given that at least one of the companies in question is a US company; my money's on either the last of those or a variant of it. The first page of the leaked document speaks of Indian Military Intelligence wanting access to the USCC, and deciding to "sign an agreement with mobile manufacturers (MM) in exchange for the Indian market presence", so whatever they asked for was at least partially motivated by the desire to snoop on the USCC, but whether they presented it as such to the mobile manufacturers is another matter.)
TFA makes clear that "RINOA" refers to RIM, Nokia, Apple, etc... i.e., other manufacturers as well.
And the leaked document explicitly mentions one other manufacturer, Micromax, who sell at least one Android phone, so perhaps Google is on the list, in effect. (I.e., it may "stand to reason that only companies which make mobile OSes are on the list", but, well, there's at least one manufacturer that uses other people's OSes explicitly mentioned in the leaked document, and they use Android on at least one phone.)
Unfortunately for the story, it doesn't make very clear whether or not any of this is reality or just some bureaucrat's wet dream.
Erm, well, the leaked document cites some (e-mail?) messages that they managed to intercept, so, unless the bureaucrat faked or had somebody else fake those messages, it might be real.
CALEA requires interception and not backdoor access to any particular device. It is the equivalent of a wiretap. Interception is done on the network itself and the data is forwarded to the requesting law enforcement agency.
Comments seem to miss the fact that India used this back door to spy on a us government organization?
Hey, the US government is quite happy to spy on its allies; think of India as just returning the favor.
Isn't that a problem? It's the cyber equivalent to selling arms to Iran or north Korea...
Then maybe the US government either needs to assume that mobile phone communications can be snooped on by other governments or explicitly ban US corporations from selling mobile phones with backdoors of that sort (and buy only mobile phones from US corporations or somehow figure out how to stop, say, Canadian or Finnish - or South Korean or... - mobile phone makers from doing that as well).
Really? India government used backdoor provided by an American company (Apple) to spy on an US government body. It doesn't really sounds lawful to me. More like treason...
The actions of the Indian government are not treasonous, as the Indian government was, last time I checked, not a U.S. citizen. Maybe you consider it treasonous, or at least "not nice", for the Indian government to spy on the US government, as they're friendly government, but, hey, the US government isn't exactly above spying on its friends....
If you mean that Apple were traitors, well, it's not clear from the document that the Indian government explicitly said "you want access to the Indian mobile phone market, you have to let us snoop US government traffic", so it's not clear that this amounted to Apple explicitly providing the backdoor for that particular purpose.
More proof that Apple "caring" about users is complete bullshit. They only care about their bottom line. This is why they have so many user-unfriendly policies.
Boycott Apple.
...in favor about companies that care more about their users than their bottom line. Any suggestions for companies of that sort?
"If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?"
You could, or you could, for example, assume that, because OS X isn't a mobile phone OS, they weren't asked for those sorts of backdoors and didn't provide them. Or you could assume that they've provided both sets of backdoors, independently. I.e., the "if... then" is somewhat bogus there.
One might be better advised to ask about backdoors in any OS, especially not-completely-open-source OSes, regardless of which particular vendor they came from. As noted elsewhere, the title of the/. article could be changed to "Leaked Memo Says That RIM Provides Backdoor To Governments" or "Leaked Memo Says That Nokia Provides Backdoor To Governments" without loss of generality. It could also be changed to "...Provides Backdoor To Indian Government", as the memo says nothing about other governments; the Indian government apparently required that to allow "Indian market presence", which is not to say that other governments do not impose similar requirements.
What's special about RIM, Nokia, and Apple, I have no idea.
Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading this lie. We can't run a country based on false information.
The NDAA is a military spending bill. It gets passed every year. For several years it has allowed the military to detain members of Al Qaeda, and no one had a problem with this. In the latest version, this was expanded to cover members of other terrorists organizations, but it still states that it cannot be applied to United States citizens or immigrants.
Authorities- Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
...because they're the ones who believe all the "2012 is the end of the world" crap. I suspect most folks of Mayan ancestry either don't know about the 2012 hype and don't care, don't know about the Long Count rollover and don't care, or do know about it and understand it's just some part of the calendar rolling over, not some end-of-the-world crap.
Both unix and windows use time formats that assume there are 86400 seconds in a day.
Actually, both UNIX and Windows have two time formats:
the one that is more-or-less a count of second-or-sub-second intervals since a fixed time in the past;
the one that's year/month/day/hour/minute/second/maybe fractions of a second.
Amusingly:
for the first of them, the UNIX one ("Seconds Since the Epoch" or time_t/struct timeval/struct timespec etc.) explicitly says, in effect, the clock freezes during positive leap seconds and jumps ahead extra fast during negative leap seconds, and the Windows one (FILETIME) just says "the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601 (UTC)", so the UNIX one explicitly does weird stuff about leap seconds and the Windows one doesn't;
for the second of them, the UNIX one (struct tm) is, at least in the C standard, explicitly specified so as to allow at least one leap second (the tm_sec field can have values from 0 to 60, not just from 0 to 59), whilst the Windows one (SYSTEMTIME) is explicitly specified as not to allow positive leap seconds (the wSecond field is "The second. The valid values for this member are 0 through 59.").
In both cases at least some code will get behavior during positive leap seconds other than "time progresses at a rate of one second-length tick per second, and the clock goes from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60" - one or the other of those will be violated on UN*X systems that actually do what the Single UNIX Specification says and on Windows systems that actually do what the MSDN documentation says.
Hey, did you think gettimeofday returned the number of seconds since the epoch? That a call to gettimeofday would return a value >= to the last call? Well, it doesn't, because it's based on UTC,
It's only "based on UTC" to the extent that the definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch" speaks of "Coordinated Universal Time name"; the formula to compute a "Seconds Since the Epoch" value from a "Coordinated Universal Time name", meaning year-month-day hour:minute:second expressed as a struct tm, can return the same value for two different Coordinated Universal Time names corresponding to different instants in time, so "Seconds Since the Epoch" is not actually a count of the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch.
I.e., don't blame the definers of UTC for this, blame the definers of POSIX for this.
which is defined as seconds since the epoch, minus leaps seconds.
UTC isn't defined as seconds since anything. That's the definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch". Perhaps the POSIX spec should have called it "Seconds Since the Epoch, Except For Positive Leap Seconds", or something such as that.
As a result, a value returned by gettimeofday does not refer 1:1 to a point in time, and the clock will skip a second backwards at random moments (leap seconds happen when IERS says so).
It's more like "will freeze for a second at random moments", but, yeah, that's true, assuming whatever generates gettimeofday() values takes leap seconds into account. ("Whatever generates gettimeofday() values" includes not only the low-level time-of-day clock but any NTP etc. code that adjusts that clock, so it may well do so if you're using NTP.)
I mean, you could put the leap second logic in the same place timevals are converted to a user-displayable format, like timezones, DST and, i don't know, leap YEARS,
Not only could you do that, the folks doing the Olson time zone code and database DID do that quite a while ago (well over a decade ago, possibly over two decades ago - I could go check my copy of the tz mailing list to see when we first started talking about leap seconds); said code is quite capable of converting a count of seconds that have (or will have) elapsed since the Epoch into a Coordinated Universal Time name for any time in the past and for any time in the future happening before a not-yet-announced leap second. If it's handed a time in the future and, at some point in the future before then, a leap second is announced some time before that time in the future, the value would be wrong, but, well, if you need that UTC name for some purpose that involves actually displaying the UTC name for the time of some future event, that's life - the UTC name for an event that occurs N seconds after the Epoch is not guaranteed to be known until less than eight weeks remain until that event, so if you've told somebody a UTC name for that event eight or more weeks in advance, you might have to go apologize and correct later if the IERS drops a leap second in your path.
The Olson code is also capable of converting UTC names back into counts of seconds that have (or will have) elapsed since the Epoch. And, yes, if it's handed a time in the future and, at some point in the future blah blah blah, it can give you a time_t that ultimately is wrong, but if, say, you're using this to arrange for something to happen at some point in the future, either 1) that something is ultimately known to be N seconds in the future, in which case there's no need to be dicking around with UTC names or 2) it's ultimately known to happen at XXXX-XX-XX HH:MM:SS, in which case, well, if a leap second gets dropped in your path, the "when" for that event is going to change because the instant of time to which XXXX-XX-XX HH:MM:SS refers is going to change, so you'll have to reschedule the event.
Yes, indeed. The gettimeofday() function should be used only when you need the time of day.
So what do I use if I need the time of day in UTC as specified by ITU-R TF.460-6? I.e., what do I use to get the time of day in a form such that
2 Leap-seconds
2.1 A positive or negative leap-second should be the last second of a UTC month, but first preference should be given to the end of December and June, and second preference to the end of March and September.
2.2 A positive leap-second begins at 23h 59m 60s and ends at 0h 0m 0s of the first day of the following month. In the case of a negative leap-second, 23h 59m 58s will be followed one second later by 0h 0m 0s of the first day of the following month (see Annex 3).
applies, complete with the clock going from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00 the next day when a positive leap second occurs and going from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00 the next day when a negative leap second occurs?
Hint: the answer does not involve using any API in the Single UNIX Specification. The answer might involve a combination of an API that returns a count of elapsed seconds of real time since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC - which is NOT the same as "Seconds Since the Epoch" as defined in the Single UNIX Specification, as the latter doesn't just count seconds over leap seconds - and an API that acts like the gmtime() in the Olson sample code when used with an Olson database file that includes leap seconds.
(Note that the formula in the Single UNIX Specification's definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch" - section 4.15 in "Base Definitions" in the current version of the SUS - can give the same value for "Seconds Since the Epoch" for two different "Coordinated Universal Time names"; the formula
will give the same value for XXXX-XX-XX 23:59:60 and {XXXX-XX-XX + one day} 00:00:00, so that the clock sticks during a positive leap second; that's why you can't turn "Seconds Since the Epoch" into what the SUS calls a "Coordinated Universal Time name" and always get the correct "Coordinated Universal Time name".)
(And, no, CLOCK_MONOTONIC won't do it, as that's time "since some unspecified starting point", so only differences between CLOCK_MONOTONIC values are meaningful. I can has CLOCK_REALTIME_BUT_NOT_FUCKED_UP_BY_LEAP_SECOND_POSIX_CRAP?)
How does "3% failure rate" count as "worse than AIDS"?
It gives a false sense of security that actually increases the overall AIDS transmission rate by encouraging people to make bad decisions.
Evidence?
It prevents human life from being conceived in the first place. That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Only if you're Stalin and trying to cut down on the number of people your communist paradise has to feed.
Or if you're a parent and want to divide the finite resources (including time!) you have amongst fewer children.
So does choosing not to have sex. How far must people go to maximize the number of babies conceived?
No further than simple reasonable monogamous morality creates.
OK, so what do you think about abstinence?:-)
Unless you treat the material quality of life as irrelevant (as "Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all" suggests you do)
Worse than that- I treat that sort of misguided materialism as downright irrational and emotion based.
And I treat a belief that the quality of life doesn't matter as downright irrational and emotion-based - you, like I, are, after all, apes, and are subject to irrational and emotional behavior. In this case, as far as I'm concerned, it's your behavior that's irrational. Perhaps we just start from different premises? The conclusions reason leads to depend on the premises chosen.
you then don't have 1 vs. 0, you have a number from, say, 0 to 1, and, if you look at humanity as a whole, you have the sum of all those numbers - and if you have finite resources to support human life,
Which we don't. We'll never even reach 1/10th the carrying capacity of our resources.
Evidence?
that puts an upper bound on that sum, so you then have to decide whether "more lives" or "better lives" is more important. When it comes to the abstract notion of hypothetical lives, I put "better lives" on top; better that fewer people are conceived and have better lives than that more people are conceived and have worse lives. Perhaps the sum of all qualities of life is the same in both cases, but, hey, it's now a two-variable problem, and I'm choosing to maximize "average quality of life" rather than "number of lives", given that I don't actually have to kill anybody to do that.
That's because you are not rational, and are basing your argument on a set of data that has already been disproven.
Evidence?
Yup. And if I lose my faith in one of those authorities, e.g. because (to pick an extreme example) somebody finds that their work is fraudulent, I may well end up believing something else.
But you don't. For instance, the idea of finite resources has been proven to be fraudulent, yet you base your whole philosophy of materialism over humanity upon it.
Evidence?
What you were rejecting in that line of argument was "My point is that rationality requires careful consideration of evidence and that religion requires only faith (i.e. belief based solely on some authority)." I read that as not necessarily rejecting some level of faith; I read it as arguing that religion doesn't require careful consideration of evidence.
Already disproven in this thread by Pope Benedict's separation of rational and irrational religions- rational religions ALWAYS require careful consideration of the evidence and rethinking of assumptions based on the full sum of available evidence (that is, rational religion differs from science only in a lack of belief in reductionism).
Evidence? (You must have some in order to validly say "objectively" here.)
3% failure rate,
How does "3% failure rate" count as "worse than AIDS"?
plus it prevents human life from being born in the first place.
It prevents human life from being conceived in the first place. That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all
So does choosing not to have sex. How far must people go to maximize the number of babies conceived?
And having more children can also reduce the resources available to your own or other people's children; shortening other people's lives, adding disease and woe to their lives, seems more than a bit selfish to me.
Also, I'd point out the example of Uganda- since embracing monogamy, their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms.
(1>0).
If you're looking at a single individual, maybe that applies.
Unless you treat the material quality of life as irrelevant (as "Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all" suggests you do), you then don't have 1 vs. 0, you have a number from, say, 0 to 1, and, if you look at humanity as a whole, you have the sum of all those numbers - and if you have finite resources to support human life, that puts an upper bound on that sum, so you then have to decide whether "more lives" or "better lives" is more important. When it comes to the abstract notion of hypothetical lives, I put "better lives" on top; better that fewer people are conceived and have better lives than that more people are conceived and have worse lives. Perhaps the sum of all qualities of life is the same in both cases, but, hey, it's now a two-variable problem, and I'm choosing to maximize "average quality of life" rather than "number of lives", given that I don't actually have to kill anybody to do that.
I'd point out the example of Uganda- since embracing monogamy, their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms.
It is likely that the number of new HIV infections in Uganda peaked in the late 1980s, and then fell sharply until the mid 1990s. This is generally thought to have been the result of behaviour changes such as increased abstinence and monogamy, a rise in the average age of first sex, a reduction in the average number of sexual partners and more frequent use of condoms.
which isn't quite the same as "their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms".
What if there is more than one way to live that is in keeping with the DNA of that species?"
You'd need extraordinary proof for that statement, since there's only one species.
...with only one allele of every gene, right?
Oops, sorry, no, there are multiple alleles, and some of them may result in different preferences and behaviors, so there's nothing at all extraordinary about different members of a species having different ways of living, each of which is in keeping with the individual's DNA.
Perhaps there's only one way of organizing a society so that those members can all have a way of living that's in keeping with their DNA, but if you have multiple populations with separate societies, and those populations have different frequencies of the alleles in question, perhaps one society's way will differ from another society's way.
Yes, indeed, there's no such guarantee. Tomorrow morning the Sun will probably still have fuel to burn, but, eventually, there's a good reason to believe it'll run out.
I see calling someone as Socialist as reprehensible as calling them a Nigger. It's not meant to understand, but to insult and denigrate.
At least in the U.S., that would be because "Socialist" has been used rather a lot lately to insult and denigrate. Perhaps enough of that has bled north that you view it that way as well.:-) I suspect that in a lot of countries "Socialist" would not be used to insult and denigrate the person being designated as a "Socialist", especially in the countries where there's a significant political party called the "Socialist Party".
I see labelling someone a "Libertarian" (for example) as no more viable than assuming the personality of someone just because they're Black, Hispanic, etc.
"Labeling someone a {insert your ideology here}" is not the same thing as "assuming the personality of someone just because they're {insert race, sex, ethnicity} here". It's the same as "labeling someone a member of {race, sex, ethnicity}", and both are quite viable in many circumstances. If somebody has a Y chromosome, I'm probably correct to label them as a "male" (modulo transsexuality, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, etc.). If somebody believes in a minimal government, with no drug laws, no sodomy laws, little or no regulation of private commerce, a military sufficient to defend against external attack but no more, etc., I'm probably correct to label them as a "libertarian". There are other cases where it's not so easy - what about somebody who believes there should be no drug or sodomy laws, little or no regulation of private commerce, and a large military with bases all over the world? What's their ideology called? What's the race or ethnicity of somebody from a very-mixed background? In their case, it might be what they consider themselves, unless that's a completely silly self-identification (e.g., somebody whose ancestry is 127/128th northern European white and 1/128th Nigerian black identifying themselves as "black" if nobody else even knows about their black great-great-great-...-grandfather).
The labels themselves are bigotry, regardless of whether they're based on race, creed, or profession.
Calling Keith Ellison or Herman Cain or Condoleezza Rice "black", or calling Mitt Romney or Bernie Sanders or Stephen Harper "white", or calling Joseph Lieberman "Jewish", or calling Rick Santorum "Catholic", or calling Keith Ellison "Muslim", or calling Linus Torvalds a "programmer" or "software engineer", is bigotry?
Some statistics don't tell you anything useful. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse a particular ideology doesn't tell you what their thoughts on the issues are.
Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse libertarianism tells you that those programmers are probably not going to be in favor of, say, strong government regulations of pollutant emissions or of drug laws. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse social-democratic views tells you that those programmers are probably going to be in favor of some form of universal health insurance with some form of government mandate. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse....
None of those tell you that all programmers will have those views, but I'm not sure that anybody argued that all programmers will, say, oppose strong government regulations of pollutant emissions and oppose drug laws and....
That's nothing compared to the effects of his stance on condom use (i.e. that it's worse than AIDS).
Objectively, it IS worse than AIDS.
Evidence? (You must have some in order to validly say "objectively" here.)
What is wrong with morality and insisting that for a given species, there might be one way to live that is in keeping with the DNA of that species?
What if there is more than one way to live that is in keeping with the DNA of that species?
Which leaves us with a myriad of phenomena that exists for only ONE person- and that is the realm of philosophy and theology. And here, authority is even more important, for it separates rational religion from irrational religion. Rational religions have an authority to bring together all the data, and separate what is true from what is false.
And the reason why we should accept any particular religion's authority is?
So you see, I reject your definition of rationality for the precise reason that you reject the concept of an authority to give us one reality. For without that authority; there is no guarantee that because the sun came up this morning that the sun will come up tomorrow morning
Yes, indeed, there's no such guarantee. Tomorrow morning the Sun will probably still have fuel to burn, but, eventually, there's a good reason to believe it'll run out.
Well judging by the bulk of comments (and moderation) here on/., I think it's pretty clear that as a group they sure as hell aren't libertarians.
Judging by the bulk of comments here on/. (and not just in this thread), I think it's pretty clear that as a group Slashdot commenters sure as hell aren't anything in particular. (And I don't know what percentage are "engineers", for any of a number of definitions of "engineer".) There are a significant number of pro-libertarian comments on many threads, but I've not done enough of a study to conclude that a majority or even plurality are pro-libertarian.
My impression of hardware engineers (at least where I work) is that they tend to be more politically conservative and more likely to stay married. Those that tend to be libertarian also seem to be social conservatives.
"Social conservatives" in what sense? If they support, for example, drug laws, or sodomy laws, or laws against pornography, there's no way I'm going to consider them "libertarian".
I also get the impression that software engineers are more progressive or libertarian. No idea how common this is.
In which case perhaps the title of your post should have been "Hardware engineers tend to be conservative".
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I highly doubt this is true. Not one of these companies would want to be a part of a government looking in on another government's information.
You're presuming that they were told that the purpose of this was to be a part of a government looking in on another government's information, or that, even if they were told or could guess it, they weren't in a position of plausible deniability.
I'm pretty sure that they would be good contenders for treason charges if this was true,
Good luck charging Canadian and Finnish companies with treason against the US (unless you're referring to their US subsidiaries).
That being said, if it's going across wires and isn't encrypted, you shouldn't really expect it to be considered safe information.
Exactly. The question is whether the backdoors mentioned in the memo allow tapping of information before it gets encrypted, e.g. a way to intercept ("lawfully" or otherwise) $PROTOCOL-over-SSL traffic.
as most of OS X's core functionality is open source. It's possible for them to hide something in the quartz engine or something,
Or in a non-open-source kernel extension ("kernel loadable module", for the benefit of those who only know Linux terms), if you're talking kernel-based backdoors, or a non-open-source module loaded by open-source userland code, if you're talking about userland backdoors.
I'm just waiting for my ironymeter to jump to 11 when the US Government condemns the spying.
So as not to have people complain about your post's use of the word "irony", you might want to replace your ironymeter with a hypocrisymeter. The hypothetical situation you describe would quickly peg a hypocrisymeter.
Not really the same.
(According to the Wikipedia Article) Lawful Interception is when communication providers log connections and keep these logs for 6 months in case they're requested by a Judge.
I guess "the Wikipedia Article" refers either to the article about the EU Data Retention Directive or to the second paragraph in the "Europe" subsection of the "Laws" section of the article on Lawful Interception, because that's all you're describing. There's more to "lawful interception" than that. A Boring Old-Fashioned Wiretap, when authorized by a judge, is "lawful interception".
Offering a backdoor for real-time logging is a completely different thing. A Judge could easily be bypassed with such an interface.
The same applies to splicing into a phone line; a judge can easily be bypassed by a police department or an N Letter Agency just connecting in and listening. I've not seen anything to indicate that the capabilities that RIM, Nokia, Apple, etc. were required to provide were described to the phone suppliers by the Indian government as anything other than lawful intercept capabilities. That doesn't necessarily stop the Indian Directorate General of Military Intelligence (Foreign Division) from using it to snoop on the The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC).
(I've also not seen anything to indicate how the capabilities were described, period; it could have been anything from "we need this to wiretap drug dealers' e-mail" to "we need this to wiretap the U.S. Government's e-mail" to "we need this for our purposes, we don't have to tell you why, you just need to do it if you want to keep selling phones in a market of over 800 million mobile phone users". My money's not on the middle one of those, given that at least one of the companies in question is a US company; my money's on either the last of those or a variant of it. The first page of the leaked document speaks of Indian Military Intelligence wanting access to the USCC, and deciding to "sign an agreement with mobile manufacturers (MM) in exchange for the Indian market presence", so whatever they asked for was at least partially motivated by the desire to snoop on the USCC, but whether they presented it as such to the mobile manufacturers is another matter.)
TFA makes clear that "RINOA" refers to RIM, Nokia, Apple, etc... i.e., other manufacturers as well.
And the leaked document explicitly mentions one other manufacturer, Micromax, who sell at least one Android phone, so perhaps Google is on the list, in effect. (I.e., it may "stand to reason that only companies which make mobile OSes are on the list", but, well, there's at least one manufacturer that uses other people's OSes explicitly mentioned in the leaked document, and they use Android on at least one phone.)
Unfortunately for the story, it doesn't make very clear whether or not any of this is reality or just some bureaucrat's wet dream.
Erm, well, the leaked document cites some (e-mail?) messages that they managed to intercept, so, unless the bureaucrat faked or had somebody else fake those messages, it might be real.
CALEA requires interception and not backdoor access to any particular device. It is the equivalent of a wiretap. Interception is done on the network itself and the data is forwarded to the requesting law enforcement agency.
And for those who are curious, here's H.R. 4922, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act", which became Public Law 103-414 (which does not appear to be on any of the Government Printing Office sites for Public Laws).
Comments seem to miss the fact that India used this back door to spy on a us government organization?
Hey, the US government is quite happy to spy on its allies; think of India as just returning the favor.
Isn't that a problem? It's the cyber equivalent to selling arms to Iran or north Korea...
Then maybe the US government either needs to assume that mobile phone communications can be snooped on by other governments or explicitly ban US corporations from selling mobile phones with backdoors of that sort (and buy only mobile phones from US corporations or somehow figure out how to stop, say, Canadian or Finnish - or South Korean or... - mobile phone makers from doing that as well).
Really? India government used backdoor provided by an American company (Apple) to spy on an US government body. It doesn't really sounds lawful to me. More like treason...
The actions of the Indian government are not treasonous, as the Indian government was, last time I checked, not a U.S. citizen. Maybe you consider it treasonous, or at least "not nice", for the Indian government to spy on the US government, as they're friendly government, but, hey, the US government isn't exactly above spying on its friends....
If you mean that Apple were traitors, well, it's not clear from the document that the Indian government explicitly said "you want access to the Indian mobile phone market, you have to let us snoop US government traffic", so it's not clear that this amounted to Apple explicitly providing the backdoor for that particular purpose.
More proof that Apple "caring" about users is complete bullshit. They only care about their bottom line. This is why they have so many user-unfriendly policies.
Boycott Apple.
...in favor about companies that care more about their users than their bottom line. Any suggestions for companies of that sort?
"If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?"
You could, or you could, for example, assume that, because OS X isn't a mobile phone OS, they weren't asked for those sorts of backdoors and didn't provide them. Or you could assume that they've provided both sets of backdoors, independently. I.e., the "if ... then" is somewhat bogus there.
One might be better advised to ask about backdoors in any OS, especially not-completely-open-source OSes, regardless of which particular vendor they came from. As noted elsewhere, the title of the /. article could be changed to "Leaked Memo Says That RIM Provides Backdoor To Governments" or "Leaked Memo Says That Nokia Provides Backdoor To Governments" without loss of generality. It could also be changed to "...Provides Backdoor To Indian Government", as the memo says nothing about other governments; the Indian government apparently required that to allow "Indian market presence", which is not to say that other governments do not impose similar requirements.
What's special about RIM, Nokia, and Apple, I have no idea.
Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading this lie. We can't run a country based on false information.
The NDAA is a military spending bill. It gets passed every year. For several years it has allowed the military to detain members of Al Qaeda, and no one had a problem with this. In the latest version, this was expanded to cover members of other terrorists organizations, but it still states that it cannot be applied to United States citizens or immigrants.
What Section 1021, subsection (e), of H.R. 1540 as enrolled says is
which doesn't explicitly say it cannot be applied to US citizens etc.. The question is what "existing law or authorities" say. Senator Carl Levin quoted the Supreme Court as saying "There is no bar to this nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant.", which comes from the O'Connor/Rehnquist/Kennedy/Breyer opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. On the other hand, they also say "It is a clearly established principle of the law of war that detention may last no longer than active hostilities.", but if active hostilities continue until we've defeated "those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons", who knows when they'll cease.
will be screwed
...because they're the ones who believe all the "2012 is the end of the world" crap. I suspect most folks of Mayan ancestry either don't know about the 2012 hype and don't care, don't know about the Long Count rollover and don't care, or do know about it and understand it's just some part of the calendar rolling over, not some end-of-the-world crap.
Afaict both windows and unix use core time formats that assume 86400 seconds in a day and simply cannot represent leap seconds.
See the response to your other post on this for details.
Both unix and windows use time formats that assume there are 86400 seconds in a day.
Actually, both UNIX and Windows have two time formats:
Amusingly:
In both cases at least some code will get behavior during positive leap seconds other than "time progresses at a rate of one second-length tick per second, and the clock goes from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60" - one or the other of those will be violated on UN*X systems that actually do what the Single UNIX Specification says and on Windows systems that actually do what the MSDN documentation says.
Hey, did you think gettimeofday returned the number of seconds since the epoch? That a call to gettimeofday would return a value >= to the last call? Well, it doesn't, because it's based on UTC,
It's only "based on UTC" to the extent that the definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch" speaks of "Coordinated Universal Time name"; the formula to compute a "Seconds Since the Epoch" value from a "Coordinated Universal Time name", meaning year-month-day hour:minute:second expressed as a struct tm, can return the same value for two different Coordinated Universal Time names corresponding to different instants in time, so "Seconds Since the Epoch" is not actually a count of the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Epoch.
I.e., don't blame the definers of UTC for this, blame the definers of POSIX for this.
which is defined as seconds since the epoch, minus leaps seconds.
UTC isn't defined as seconds since anything. That's the definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch". Perhaps the POSIX spec should have called it "Seconds Since the Epoch, Except For Positive Leap Seconds", or something such as that.
As a result, a value returned by gettimeofday does not refer 1:1 to a point in time, and the clock will skip a second backwards at random moments (leap seconds happen when IERS says so).
It's more like "will freeze for a second at random moments", but, yeah, that's true, assuming whatever generates gettimeofday() values takes leap seconds into account. ("Whatever generates gettimeofday() values" includes not only the low-level time-of-day clock but any NTP etc. code that adjusts that clock, so it may well do so if you're using NTP.)
I mean, you could put the leap second logic in the same place timevals are converted to a user-displayable format, like timezones, DST and, i don't know, leap YEARS,
Not only could you do that, the folks doing the Olson time zone code and database DID do that quite a while ago (well over a decade ago, possibly over two decades ago - I could go check my copy of the tz mailing list to see when we first started talking about leap seconds); said code is quite capable of converting a count of seconds that have (or will have) elapsed since the Epoch into a Coordinated Universal Time name for any time in the past and for any time in the future happening before a not-yet-announced leap second. If it's handed a time in the future and, at some point in the future before then, a leap second is announced some time before that time in the future, the value would be wrong, but, well, if you need that UTC name for some purpose that involves actually displaying the UTC name for the time of some future event, that's life - the UTC name for an event that occurs N seconds after the Epoch is not guaranteed to be known until less than eight weeks remain until that event, so if you've told somebody a UTC name for that event eight or more weeks in advance, you might have to go apologize and correct later if the IERS drops a leap second in your path.
The Olson code is also capable of converting UTC names back into counts of seconds that have (or will have) elapsed since the Epoch. And, yes, if it's handed a time in the future and, at some point in the future blah blah blah, it can give you a time_t that ultimately is wrong, but if, say, you're using this to arrange for something to happen at some point in the future, either 1) that something is ultimately known to be N seconds in the future, in which case there's no need to be dicking around with UTC names or 2) it's ultimately known to happen at XXXX-XX-XX HH:MM:SS, in which case, well, if a leap second gets dropped in your path, the "when" for that event is going to change because the instant of time to which XXXX-XX-XX HH:MM:SS refers is going to change, so you'll have to reschedule the event.
Yes, indeed. The gettimeofday() function should be used only when you need the time of day.
So what do I use if I need the time of day in UTC as specified by ITU-R TF.460-6? I.e., what do I use to get the time of day in a form such that
applies, complete with the clock going from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00 the next day when a positive leap second occurs and going from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00 the next day when a negative leap second occurs?
Hint: the answer does not involve using any API in the Single UNIX Specification. The answer might involve a combination of an API that returns a count of elapsed seconds of real time since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC - which is NOT the same as "Seconds Since the Epoch" as defined in the Single UNIX Specification, as the latter doesn't just count seconds over leap seconds - and an API that acts like the gmtime() in the Olson sample code when used with an Olson database file that includes leap seconds.
(Note that the formula in the Single UNIX Specification's definition of "Seconds Since the Epoch" - section 4.15 in "Base Definitions" in the current version of the SUS - can give the same value for "Seconds Since the Epoch" for two different "Coordinated Universal Time names"; the formula
will give the same value for XXXX-XX-XX 23:59:60 and {XXXX-XX-XX + one day} 00:00:00, so that the clock sticks during a positive leap second; that's why you can't turn "Seconds Since the Epoch" into what the SUS calls a "Coordinated Universal Time name" and always get the correct "Coordinated Universal Time name".)
(And, no, CLOCK_MONOTONIC won't do it, as that's time "since some unspecified starting point", so only differences between CLOCK_MONOTONIC values are meaningful. I can has CLOCK_REALTIME_BUT_NOT_FUCKED_UP_BY_LEAP_SECOND_POSIX_CRAP?)
Hmmm, mildly clever troll? Or just further proof that Ron Paul is supported by really stupid people?
Poe's law strikes again. (My vote is that the answer to the first question is "yes".)
How does "3% failure rate" count as "worse than AIDS"?
It gives a false sense of security that actually increases the overall AIDS transmission rate by encouraging people to make bad decisions.
Evidence?
It prevents human life from being conceived in the first place. That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Only if you're Stalin and trying to cut down on the number of people your communist paradise has to feed.
Or if you're a parent and want to divide the finite resources (including time!) you have amongst fewer children.
So does choosing not to have sex. How far must people go to maximize the number of babies conceived?
No further than simple reasonable monogamous morality creates.
OK, so what do you think about abstinence? :-)
Unless you treat the material quality of life as irrelevant (as "Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all" suggests you do)
Worse than that- I treat that sort of misguided materialism as downright irrational and emotion based.
And I treat a belief that the quality of life doesn't matter as downright irrational and emotion-based - you, like I, are, after all, apes, and are subject to irrational and emotional behavior. In this case, as far as I'm concerned, it's your behavior that's irrational. Perhaps we just start from different premises? The conclusions reason leads to depend on the premises chosen.
you then don't have 1 vs. 0, you have a number from, say, 0 to 1, and, if you look at humanity as a whole, you have the sum of all those numbers - and if you have finite resources to support human life,
Which we don't. We'll never even reach 1/10th the carrying capacity of our resources.
Evidence?
that puts an upper bound on that sum, so you then have to decide whether "more lives" or "better lives" is more important. When it comes to the abstract notion of hypothetical lives, I put "better lives" on top; better that fewer people are conceived and have better lives than that more people are conceived and have worse lives. Perhaps the sum of all qualities of life is the same in both cases, but, hey, it's now a two-variable problem, and I'm choosing to maximize "average quality of life" rather than "number of lives", given that I don't actually have to kill anybody to do that.
That's because you are not rational, and are basing your argument on a set of data that has already been disproven.
Evidence?
Yup. And if I lose my faith in one of those authorities, e.g. because (to pick an extreme example) somebody finds that their work is fraudulent, I may well end up believing something else.
But you don't. For instance, the idea of finite resources has been proven to be fraudulent, yet you base your whole philosophy of materialism over humanity upon it.
Evidence?
What you were rejecting in that line of argument was "My point is that rationality requires careful consideration of evidence and that religion requires only faith (i.e. belief based solely on some authority)." I read that as not necessarily rejecting some level of faith; I read it as arguing that religion doesn't require careful consideration of evidence.
Already disproven in this thread by Pope Benedict's separation of rational and irrational religions- rational religions ALWAYS require careful consideration of the evidence and rethinking of assumptions based on the full sum of available evidence (that is, rational religion differs from science only in a lack of belief in reductionism).
Well, I was citing the person to whom you'
Evidence? (You must have some in order to validly say "objectively" here.)
3% failure rate,
How does "3% failure rate" count as "worse than AIDS"?
plus it prevents human life from being born in the first place.
It prevents human life from being conceived in the first place. That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all
So does choosing not to have sex. How far must people go to maximize the number of babies conceived?
And having more children can also reduce the resources available to your own or other people's children; shortening other people's lives, adding disease and woe to their lives, seems more than a bit selfish to me.
Also, I'd point out the example of Uganda- since embracing monogamy, their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms.
(1>0).
If you're looking at a single individual, maybe that applies.
Unless you treat the material quality of life as irrelevant (as "Better a short life full of disease and woe, than no life at all" suggests you do), you then don't have 1 vs. 0, you have a number from, say, 0 to 1, and, if you look at humanity as a whole, you have the sum of all those numbers - and if you have finite resources to support human life, that puts an upper bound on that sum, so you then have to decide whether "more lives" or "better lives" is more important. When it comes to the abstract notion of hypothetical lives, I put "better lives" on top; better that fewer people are conceived and have better lives than that more people are conceived and have worse lives. Perhaps the sum of all qualities of life is the same in both cases, but, hey, it's now a two-variable problem, and I'm choosing to maximize "average quality of life" rather than "number of lives", given that I don't actually have to kill anybody to do that.
I'd point out the example of Uganda- since embracing monogamy, their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms.
Well, AVERT's page on Uganda says
which isn't quite the same as "their AIDS rate has dropped immensely without use of condoms".
What if there is more than one way to live that is in keeping with the DNA of that species?"
You'd need extraordinary proof for that statement, since there's only one species.
...with only one allele of every gene, right?
Oops, sorry, no, there are multiple alleles, and some of them may result in different preferences and behaviors, so there's nothing at all extraordinary about different members of a species having different ways of living, each of which is in keeping with the individual's DNA.
Perhaps there's only one way of organizing a society so that those members can all have a way of living that's in keeping with their DNA, but if you have multiple populations with separate societies, and those populations have different frequencies of the alleles in question, perhaps one society's way will differ from another society's way.
Yes, indeed, there's no such guarantee. Tomorrow morning the Sun will probably still have fuel to burn, but, eventually, there's a good reason to believe it'll run out.
But the point is, you take that based o
I see calling someone as Socialist as reprehensible as calling them a Nigger. It's not meant to understand, but to insult and denigrate.
At least in the U.S., that would be because "Socialist" has been used rather a lot lately to insult and denigrate. Perhaps enough of that has bled north that you view it that way as well. :-) I suspect that in a lot of countries "Socialist" would not be used to insult and denigrate the person being designated as a "Socialist", especially in the countries where there's a significant political party called the "Socialist Party".
I see labelling someone a "Libertarian" (for example) as no more viable than assuming the personality of someone just because they're Black, Hispanic, etc.
"Labeling someone a {insert your ideology here}" is not the same thing as "assuming the personality of someone just because they're {insert race, sex, ethnicity} here". It's the same as "labeling someone a member of {race, sex, ethnicity}", and both are quite viable in many circumstances. If somebody has a Y chromosome, I'm probably correct to label them as a "male" (modulo transsexuality, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, etc.). If somebody believes in a minimal government, with no drug laws, no sodomy laws, little or no regulation of private commerce, a military sufficient to defend against external attack but no more, etc., I'm probably correct to label them as a "libertarian". There are other cases where it's not so easy - what about somebody who believes there should be no drug or sodomy laws, little or no regulation of private commerce, and a large military with bases all over the world? What's their ideology called? What's the race or ethnicity of somebody from a very-mixed background? In their case, it might be what they consider themselves, unless that's a completely silly self-identification (e.g., somebody whose ancestry is 127/128th northern European white and 1/128th Nigerian black identifying themselves as "black" if nobody else even knows about their black great-great-great-...-grandfather).
The labels themselves are bigotry, regardless of whether they're based on race, creed, or profession.
Calling Keith Ellison or Herman Cain or Condoleezza Rice "black", or calling Mitt Romney or Bernie Sanders or Stephen Harper "white", or calling Joseph Lieberman "Jewish", or calling Rick Santorum "Catholic", or calling Keith Ellison "Muslim", or calling Linus Torvalds a "programmer" or "software engineer", is bigotry?
Some statistics don't tell you anything useful. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse a particular ideology doesn't tell you what their thoughts on the issues are.
Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse libertarianism tells you that those programmers are probably not going to be in favor of, say, strong government regulations of pollutant emissions or of drug laws. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse social-democratic views tells you that those programmers are probably going to be in favor of some form of universal health insurance with some form of government mandate. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse....
None of those tell you that all programmers will have those views, but I'm not sure that anybody argued that all programmers will, say, oppose strong government regulations of pollutant emissions and oppose drug laws and....
That's nothing compared to the effects of his stance on condom use (i.e. that it's worse than AIDS).
Objectively, it IS worse than AIDS.
Evidence? (You must have some in order to validly say "objectively" here.)
What is wrong with morality and insisting that for a given species, there might be one way to live that is in keeping with the DNA of that species?
What if there is more than one way to live that is in keeping with the DNA of that species?
Which leaves us with a myriad of phenomena that exists for only ONE person- and that is the realm of philosophy and theology. And here, authority is even more important, for it separates rational religion from irrational religion. Rational religions have an authority to bring together all the data, and separate what is true from what is false.
And the reason why we should accept any particular religion's authority is?
So you see, I reject your definition of rationality for the precise reason that you reject the concept of an authority to give us one reality. For without that authority; there is no guarantee that because the sun came up this morning that the sun will come up tomorrow morning
Yes, indeed, there's no such guarantee. Tomorrow morning the Sun will probably still have fuel to burn, but, eventually, there's a good reason to believe it'll run out.
Well judging by the bulk of comments (and moderation) here on /., I think it's pretty clear that as a group they sure as hell aren't libertarians.
Judging by the bulk of comments here on /. (and not just in this thread), I think it's pretty clear that as a group Slashdot commenters sure as hell aren't anything in particular. (And I don't know what percentage are "engineers", for any of a number of definitions of "engineer".) There are a significant number of pro-libertarian comments on many threads, but I've not done enough of a study to conclude that a majority or even plurality are pro-libertarian.
My impression of hardware engineers (at least where I work) is that they tend to be more politically conservative and more likely to stay married. Those that tend to be libertarian also seem to be social conservatives.
"Social conservatives" in what sense? If they support, for example, drug laws, or sodomy laws, or laws against pornography, there's no way I'm going to consider them "libertarian".
I also get the impression that software engineers are more progressive or libertarian. No idea how common this is.
In which case perhaps the title of your post should have been "Hardware engineers tend to be conservative".