"Under the state of emergency, all expressions or communication that could incite violence have been banned... Authorities can search and detain citizens without prior approval."
They would just need to add a ban on public gatherings to have the same conditions as France's state of "emergency" that has been in place for a full year now and been condemned [repeatedly] by the UN human rights council. As disturbing as such a thing is in Ethiopia, it is even more shocking in a "western democracy."
https://news.vice.com/article/... "France's state of emergency legislation allows the government and the police to search and detain people without a warrant, place suspects under house arrest without prior judicial clearance, block certain websites, and ban public gatherings." "They criticized France for imposing 'excessive and disproportionate restrictions on fundamental freedoms.'"
http://www.un.org/apps/news/st... "In a list of concerns... regarding several state of emergency and surveillance laws that relate to the legitimate rights of privacy and freedoms – of expression, peaceful assembly and association." "The UN experts also expressed alarm that environmental activists in France have been under house arrest in connection with the state of emergency invoked following the November attacks."
Well, that's actually good to hear! It would've been outrageous to explicitly exempt only bibles. As for Slashdot's slapshod (trolling?) reporting, well, that's pretty lame. No, I don't have time to read everything, that why I rely on a feed like this. Burn me once Slashdot! LOL
This law is a flagrant F.U. to the separation of church and state... "Digital versions of the Bible will be exempt from the digital downloads tax."
If they wanted an exemption that would do society some good, thye should exempt textbooks, but then kids might get exposed to more of that heretical "science."
Glad to see the separation of church and state is alive in well in the U S of A!!! "...digital versions of the Bible will be exempt from the digital downloads tax"
If they wanted an exemption that would do society some good, they should exempt textbooks, but then kids might get exposed to more of that heretical "science."
There could be ways to prevent some of these. I agree. But the question was if *technology* could prevent them.
That said, your idea doesn't sound like prevention; it sounds like a response to an already occuring mass shooting. Would it take any less time to deploy smoke and special glasses than police? I don't see how.
The US has stronger laws and a stronger tradition and culture of supporting freedom of expression. According to a Pew Research poll published in this week's Economist, 80% of Japanese, 70% of Germans, and 50% of French, think the government should be able to silence people offending others. In America, only a quarter felt the same. The next closest countries were Canada and Britain, both at about 40%.
US stewardship of the Internet has not been perfect, but I doubt if others can do better, either individually or collectively.
The exception to free speech laws in Europe relate to specific classes, such as inciting hate speech.
But public opinion aside, in practice, the US censors more actual content on the net under the guise of copyright or national security than many other nations. Why shouldn't Switzerland be the ONE government in charge, if the argument is that the most free and open one should have stewardship?
The point to me is that trusting a consortium of free governments is better than putting all faith in one government to do this right. Two hears are better than one. To me, it is just fundamentally flawed to entrust a global resource to one country that has its own self interests and that has demonstrably already been guilty of many intrusions on liberty and privacy on the net.
Agreed. It's not like the US has an unblemished record of openness and propriety when managing this either. The US has seized domains names and banned activities they don't like. Europe is actually much farther along on ensuring preservation of internet liberties, data protection, etc.
Shouldn't Microsoft buy this so they can patch it?!?!??!
How does the price compare to their bug bounty, if they have one? In any case, seems it would be good in the long-term for them to snatch it up before criminals do and in the long run would be better PR for Windows than having more hacking cases attributed to them. Or, maybe it's a bad precedent to set for them to pay more and pay outside the official bug bounty channels (again, if they have one)?
The good news is that even if the FBI & Feinstein & Company get their anti-strong-encryption law passed, these unsecure Microsoft keyboards will still be legal to use, whereas anything that uses strong encryption and isn't susceptible to hacks like this would be illegal... because encryption is obviously bad for America. You know, terrorism, blah, blah, blah.
Time to start using plausible deniability encryption!
This case seems a farce against the 5th amendment. I wonder if the claim, I *just* changed my password and now can't remember it after the shock of being arrested would work?
"We Had All Better Hope These Scientists Are Wrong" Of course they are! I trust the Republican politicians on matters of science. That's why I don't get vaccines and only drink fracked water.
I would say that's unnecessary for 99% of use cases, and defeats the purpose.
Hi pnutjam. That was my thought about the VM solution actually versus plain whole disk encryption.;-) Is the use case you're worried about the plausible deniability requirement? Apart from that, do you see a use case that makes it preferable to go this route and install a VM instead of just using whole disk encryption?
On the plausible deniability front however, your suggestion seems pretty interesting; definitely sounds simpler to use an encrypted container with a hidden volume than an encrypted system with a hidden OS.
That would be pretty good legal theory to try out.:) I guess it depends how the law is actually written; it's probably not as simplistic as the summary here. But if it really says "unbreakable encryption" then you could have a field day with expert witnesses explaining that all these soon-to-be illegal encryption schemes are all breakable (if you are Methuselah;;-) ).
A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government is clear we need to find a way to work with industry as technology develops to ensure that, with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the police and intelligence agencies can access the content of communications of terrorists and criminals in order to resolve police investigations and prevent criminal acts."
And the result will actually ensure that,... with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the terrorists and criminals can access the content of communications of police and intelligence agencies in order to obstruct police investigations and commit criminal acts."
Lame, technologically ignorant legislators writing laws about technology and security are going to become a real scourge!
Your secret password trick probably isn’t very clever
People often pick some phrase from pop culture — favorite lyrics from a song or a favorite line from a movie or book — and slightly mangle it by changing some capitalization or adding some punctuation, or use the first letter of each word from this phrase. Some of these passphrases might seem good and entirely unguessable, but it’s easy to underestimate the capabilities of those invested in guessing passphrases.
Imagine your adversary has taken the lyrics from every song ever written, taken the scripts from every movie and TV show, taken the text from every book ever digitized and every page on Wikipedia, in every language, and used that as a basis for their guess list. Will your passphrase still survive?
If you created your passphrase by just trying to think of a good one, there’s a pretty high chance that it’s not good enough to stand up against the might of a spy agency. For example, you might come up with “To be or not to be/ THAT is the Question?” If so, I can guarantee that you are not the first person to use this slightly-mangled classic Shakespeare quote as your passphrase, and attackers know this.
The reason the Shakespeare quote sucks as a passphrase is that it lacks something called entropy. You can think of entropy as randomness, and it’s one of the most important concepts in cryptography. It turns out humans are a species of patterns, and they are incapable of doing anything in a truly random fashion.
Even if you don’t use a quote, but instead make up a phrase off the top of your head, your phrase will still be far from random because language is predictable. As one research paper on the topic states, “users aren’t able to choose phrases made of completely random words, but are influenced by the probability of a phrase occurring in natural language,” meaning that user-chosen passphrases don’t contain as much entropy as you think they might. Your brain tends to continue using common idioms and rules of grammar that reduce randomness. For example, it disproportionately decides to follow an adverb with a verb and vice versa, or, to cite one actual case from the aforementioned research paper, to put the word “fest” after the word “sausage.”
Passphrases that come from pop culture, facts about your life, or anything that comes directly from your mind are much weaker than passphrases that are imbued with actual entropy, collected from nature.
Slashdot Mirror
"Under the state of emergency, all expressions or communication that could incite violence have been banned... Authorities can search and detain citizens without prior approval."
They would just need to add a ban on public gatherings to have the same conditions as France's state of "emergency" that has been in place for a full year now and been condemned [repeatedly] by the UN human rights council. As disturbing as such a thing is in Ethiopia, it is even more shocking in a "western democracy."
https://news.vice.com/article/...
"France's state of emergency legislation allows the government and the police to search and detain people without a warrant, place suspects under house arrest without prior judicial clearance, block certain websites, and ban public gatherings."
"They criticized France for imposing 'excessive and disproportionate restrictions on fundamental freedoms.'"
http://www.un.org/apps/news/st...
"In a list of concerns... regarding several state of emergency and surveillance laws that relate to the legitimate rights of privacy and freedoms – of expression, peaceful assembly and association."
"The UN experts also expressed alarm that environmental activists in France have been under house arrest in connection with the state of emergency invoked following the November attacks."
Is that due to being in the British Commonwealth, or the historical French influence? ;-)
Well, that's actually good to hear! It would've been outrageous to explicitly exempt only bibles.
As for Slashdot's slapshod (trolling?) reporting, well, that's pretty lame. No, I don't have time to read everything, that why I rely on a feed like this.
Burn me once Slashdot! LOL
No one should've modded you down!
This law is a flagrant F.U. to the separation of church and state...
"Digital versions of the Bible will be exempt from the digital downloads tax."
If they wanted an exemption that would do society some good, thye should exempt textbooks, but then kids might get exposed to more of that heretical "science."
Glad to see the separation of church and state is alive in well in the U S of A!!!
"...digital versions of the Bible will be exempt from the digital downloads tax"
If they wanted an exemption that would do society some good, they should exempt textbooks, but then kids might get exposed to more of that heretical "science."
Instagram or Telegram? Get your damn story straight /.
There could be ways to prevent some of these. I agree. But the question was if *technology* could prevent them.
That said, your idea doesn't sound like prevention; it sounds like a response to an already occuring mass shooting. Would it take any less time to deploy smoke and special glasses than police? I don't see how.
Can Technology Prevent Shootings?
No.
Actually, maybe it could if it led to the extinction of humans. Then there would be no more mass shootings.
The US has stronger laws and a stronger tradition and culture of supporting freedom of expression. According to a Pew Research poll published in this week's Economist, 80% of Japanese, 70% of Germans, and 50% of French, think the government should be able to silence people offending others. In America, only a quarter felt the same. The next closest countries were Canada and Britain, both at about 40%.
US stewardship of the Internet has not been perfect, but I doubt if others can do better, either individually or collectively.
The exception to free speech laws in Europe relate to specific classes, such as inciting hate speech.
But public opinion aside, in practice, the US censors more actual content on the net under the guise of copyright or national security than many other nations. Why shouldn't Switzerland be the ONE government in charge, if the argument is that the most free and open one should have stewardship?
The point to me is that trusting a consortium of free governments is better than putting all faith in one government to do this right. Two hears are better than one. To me, it is just fundamentally flawed to entrust a global resource to one country that has its own self interests and that has demonstrably already been guilty of many intrusions on liberty and privacy on the net.
Agreed. It's not like the US has an unblemished record of openness and propriety when managing this either. The US has seized domains names and banned activities they don't like. Europe is actually much farther along on ensuring preservation of internet liberties, data protection, etc.
Shouldn't Microsoft buy this so they can patch it?!?!??!
How does the price compare to their bug bounty, if they have one? In any case, seems it would be good in the long-term for them to snatch it up before criminals do and in the long run would be better PR for Windows than having more hacking cases attributed to them. Or, maybe it's a bad precedent to set for them to pay more and pay outside the official bug bounty channels (again, if they have one)?
Feinstein has her points that keep her in office.
Feinstein sucks. She *used* to have her points decades ago, but now she's just a crotchety old ignoramus with a hard on for a police state.
May her bill rest in peace, or rot in hell, as you prefer. ;)
The good news is that even if the FBI & Feinstein & Company get their anti-strong-encryption law passed, these unsecure Microsoft keyboards will still be legal to use, whereas anything that uses strong encryption and isn't susceptible to hacks like this would be illegal... because encryption is obviously bad for America. You know, terrorism, blah, blah, blah.
Time to start using plausible deniability encryption!
This case seems a farce against the 5th amendment.
I wonder if the claim, I *just* changed my password and now can't remember it after the shock of being arrested would work?
I can't read the op-ed because it's paywalled. Does anyone have access and can post it?
"We Had All Better Hope These Scientists Are Wrong"
Of course they are! I trust the Republican politicians on matters of science. That's why I don't get vaccines and only drink fracked water.
I like Steven Pinker, and I liked this article when I read it. But it's from December 2014! Not exactly newsfeed worthy anymore, Slashdot.
I would say that's unnecessary for 99% of use cases, and defeats the purpose.
Hi pnutjam. That was my thought about the VM solution actually versus plain whole disk encryption. ;-) Is the use case you're worried about the plausible deniability requirement? Apart from that, do you see a use case that makes it preferable to go this route and install a VM instead of just using whole disk encryption?
On the plausible deniability front however, your suggestion seems pretty interesting; definitely sounds simpler to use an encrypted container with a hidden volume than an encrypted system with a hidden OS.
That would be pretty good legal theory to try out. :) ;-) ).
I guess it depends how the law is actually written; it's probably not as simplistic as the summary here. But if it really says "unbreakable encryption" then you could have a field day with expert witnesses explaining that all these soon-to-be illegal encryption schemes are all breakable (if you are Methuselah;
A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government is clear we need to find a way to work with industry as technology develops to ensure that, with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the police and intelligence agencies can access the content of communications of terrorists and criminals in order to resolve police investigations and prevent criminal acts."
And the result will actually ensure that,... with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the terrorists and criminals can access the content of communications of police and intelligence agencies in order to obstruct police investigations and commit criminal acts."
Lame, technologically ignorant legislators writing laws about technology and security are going to become a real scourge!
I wouldn't do that without also encrypting the host OS's whole disk with VeraCrypt in case the passwords leak out of RAM onto disk unencrypted.
Not a secure idea...
https://theintercept.com/2015/...
Your secret password trick probably isn’t very clever
People often pick some phrase from pop culture — favorite lyrics from a song or a favorite line from a movie or book — and slightly mangle it by changing some capitalization or adding some punctuation, or use the first letter of each word from this phrase. Some of these passphrases might seem good and entirely unguessable, but it’s easy to underestimate the capabilities of those invested in guessing passphrases.
Imagine your adversary has taken the lyrics from every song ever written, taken the scripts from every movie and TV show, taken the text from every book ever digitized and every page on Wikipedia, in every language, and used that as a basis for their guess list. Will your passphrase still survive?
If you created your passphrase by just trying to think of a good one, there’s a pretty high chance that it’s not good enough to stand up against the might of a spy agency. For example, you might come up with “To be or not to be/ THAT is the Question?” If so, I can guarantee that you are not the first person to use this slightly-mangled classic Shakespeare quote as your passphrase, and attackers know this.
The reason the Shakespeare quote sucks as a passphrase is that it lacks something called entropy. You can think of entropy as randomness, and it’s one of the most important concepts in cryptography. It turns out humans are a species of patterns, and they are incapable of doing anything in a truly random fashion.
Even if you don’t use a quote, but instead make up a phrase off the top of your head, your phrase will still be far from random because language is predictable. As one research paper on the topic states, “users aren’t able to choose phrases made of completely random words, but are influenced by the probability of a phrase occurring in natural language,” meaning that user-chosen passphrases don’t contain as much entropy as you think they might. Your brain tends to continue using common idioms and rules of grammar that reduce randomness. For example, it disproportionately decides to follow an adverb with a verb and vice versa, or, to cite one actual case from the aforementioned research paper, to put the word “fest” after the word “sausage.”
Passphrases that come from pop culture, facts about your life, or anything that comes directly from your mind are much weaker than passphrases that are imbued with actual entropy, collected from nature.
Thank you for exposing a privilege escalation backdoor to your system through the TrueCrypt driver.
The OP is asking about journalists. So, your advice amounts to don't be a journalist. Not very helpful.
Mmm. I was talking about TrueCrypt (or now VeraCrypt) vanilla. I see you meant in a VM environment, so never mind. ;-)