but many others are getting the same insights into ongoing US law enforcement operations that it becomes a very open secret in real time.
This is a problem in general with secret surveillance. It works best when it breaks the target's trust in the system, in other words when he thinks he doesn't get tapped. Police and TLA's keep clamoring for this "advantage", unwilling to consider the paradoxical and self-defeating nature of it.
Talk faster. Sales tax hits the poor hardest because they have to spend their entire income - locally. The billionaire can invest and salt away and simply purchase his yachts in areas where there isn't a sales tax.
Sales tax is an extremely regressive tax. It is not a good idea.
Ah, the old strategy of posting a link that doesn't say remotely what you suggest, and hoping readers don't notice.
That link reports an complaint, an unsubstantiated, unspecific allegation from a German contractor, that "the French" (not necessarily French intelligence, could be French industry directly) do industrial espionage a lot. Headline could be "Spurned German contractor doesn't like the French!"
It's kind of different from proof of spying on heads of state, you know?
As I said: Breach of trust. Whatever you think they "should" know, it's clear some heads of state expected the US to actually stand by its word and not lie to their face about spying on them.
Sure, other nations have their skeletons in the closet too. But you know, it doesn't justify lying to them. If the Germans are such vile dogs as to deserve no privacy from the US, then let them know. Don't pretend you are the best of friends and would never consider such an act.
If there is no trust between you, very well, state that fact and let it be at that. But if you pretend there's trust, expect reactions when that trust is shown to be broken.
why would she get more rights to privacy than I would?
One thing is that as a private person she has a right to privacy just like you.
But she is also entrusted with an office. If you spy on her, you're also spying on that office, and trampling on the rights of the ones who put her there (the German public).
The game features a "survival" mode, in which the blocky hero attempts to survive against hordes of enemies, as well as a "creative" mode where players can mine blocks and use them to build pretty much any structure.
Did the reviewer play the game at all? "Surviving against a horde of enemies" is a pretty poor description of Minecraft survival mode, and in creative mode, you don't mine blocks to use them since you can get any block for free.
The nice thing about randomness though, is that it adds up. If you xor one stream of hopefully random bits with another stream of hopefully random bits, you get a result that is at least as random as the best of the two streams, quite possibly better than either. It's a rare and precious thing in cryptography: something you can't make worse by messing up. At worst you make no difference.
So if you're paranoid, come up personally with a ridiculously long phrase (you don't need to remember it), feed it through a key derivation function, and use it in a stream cipher with proven security guarantees (in particular one that passes the next-bit test for polynomial time). Instead of using this directly, xor it together with a source of hopefully random stuff.
If you write to/dev/random this is more or less what happens. Write to it to your heart's content - it can only make it better, not worse. (This is as I recall, please check with an independent source before you try).
Voila, no matter what NSA has done to your HRNG chip, this door is secured. Your time is better spent focusing on the other doors, or the windows.
(But you should be very careful in using HRNG output directly. I am very surprised to read that some open source OSes disable the stream cipher if a HRNG is present - this is a very bad idea!)
It would if we were interested in the botnet owner' profit margin. However, we're more interested in what costs the botnet owner impose on society in comparison to his private gains. Someone who would smash a $1000 computer to gain $1000 for himself is deemed less contemptible than the one would do it for $1 for himself.
That's not what exceptionalism means. Exceptionalism is when you say "other rules ought to apply to us, because obviously we're special". When the US supports trials of war criminals, but demands that their own forces can never be subject to war crimes inquiries, that's exceptionalism. Some countries are relatively open about doing whatever they can get away with. Other countries justify it with an ideology of exceptionalism. US is one of the worst offenders in the latter category.
It's not crazy. Even if actually scrubbing all parts of your childhood actions from the internet is impossible, it can be made somewhat harder to seek out. This would send a signal to those who dig nonetheless, that what they're doing isn't OK. Especially not if they're employers. Legislation can't stop everyone from doing it, but it can help make it the norm to not do it.
Wouldn't it be nice if the west had the entire moral high ground on this? Considering iranian physicists and physics professors are murdered by foreign agents over a low shoe, you can't blame Iran for being paranoid.
This might come as a surprise to you, but taxi drivers (competing against Lyft, Uber) and bed & breakfast owners (competing against Airbnb) are not very powerful groups. It's mostly very small businesses. They are tightly regulated because they are so many, so small.
As to powerful entrenched interests, do you know who's funding these startups? Silicon Valley venture capital, for a large part. To say they have political connections in California would be an understatement.
Yes, it's the evil global taxi cartel, backed up by small businesses from Edinburgh to Portland! They fight to keep the regulation in place, against poor megacorporations and venture capital firms who only want what's best for you!
There's probably a reason taxi services and bed & breakfasts are so tightly regulated, despite being mostly very small businesses - and it isn't lobbying. The "sharing economy" companies want to replace this with their own rating systems and mandatory arbitration contracts.
That makes the resolution of Chopin infinitely high, as long as you have the information.
But that is a cop-out. The extra information you need to get fidelity (comparable to a recording) is not contained in the score, it may only be imperfectly extracted from history and geography. As time passes, more and more information you could potentially extract from geography and history is lost forever.
What is to be reproduced is specific, and ambiguity is a deliberate part of the system.
I argue that it is often not, even with all the impromptu extensions composers invariably make up. I'm pretty sure whether it's Chopin or $modernist_of_choice, you could play it in a manner which is technically true to the score, but yet not at all something the composer would have wanted.
No, but if the researcher had been law enforcement rather than a mere graph-savvy computer scientist, they could find out. They would just monitor Forbes' mailbox (and maybe other likely delivery spots). Since they would know the Silk Road purchase happened as soon as it happened, they could be confident that something would drop into that mailbox.
Still, they only proved that Forbes had bought something at Silk Road. There are legal things being sold on silkroad too, and anyway the law is not indifferent to whether you bought cocaine or contraband.
The point at which Forbes would get in trouble, was when law enforcement matched a known purchase on silk road to a shipment to a known address. Bear in mind, they could be on watch for a mysterious package in the mail to Forbes, based on nothing more than what the researched uncovered in this case.
Not if you buy anything meaningful. If both parties in a trade are fully anonymous, and there is no intermediary, trust cannot exist. Either the buyer can avoid paying for the goods, or the seller can avoid actually delivering them.
(If I recall correctly, there may be some extremely few information goods which can be securely sold in this manner, namely proofs of hard mathematical statements. Then you can mess around with blind signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. But the most advanced people have managed to get out of that is decentralized mixing services, which is essentially what zerocoin is. Mixing services are economically unsound, so this won't have any impact.)
Now, if you conduct multiple trades there can be some limited trust (if we overlook the question of why anyone should trust you the very first time). But at that point, you've abandoned anonymity and settled for pseudonymity.
Hah! Far from it. All means of recording are lossy, but scores are far more lossy than even the simplest recording.
This is usually justified by claiming that what's not in the score is up to the performer's discretion. OK, fair enough, but that puts you at the mercy of your notation system - if you care about something hard to represent in notation, or don't care about something that is mandatory in the notation, you're out of luck. (Western classical music is terribly shaped by our notation).
and it has a far simpler interface that's been out of beta for a couple of centuries
Are you serious? Most people who try to learn it fail to some degree, and it's scarcely standardized - people are adding incompatible extensions all over the place. Plus, you've got to be impressed they could squeeze so many optical illusions into a notation system. As a developer, it's a classic example of the designers seeking job security!
Slashdot Mirror
This is a problem in general with secret surveillance. It works best when it breaks the target's trust in the system, in other words when he thinks he doesn't get tapped. Police and TLA's keep clamoring for this "advantage", unwilling to consider the paradoxical and self-defeating nature of it.
Talk faster. Sales tax hits the poor hardest because they have to spend their entire income - locally. The billionaire can invest and salt away and simply purchase his yachts in areas where there isn't a sales tax.
Sales tax is an extremely regressive tax. It is not a good idea.
Ah, the old strategy of posting a link that doesn't say remotely what you suggest, and hoping readers don't notice.
That link reports an complaint, an unsubstantiated, unspecific allegation from a German contractor, that "the French" (not necessarily French intelligence, could be French industry directly) do industrial espionage a lot. Headline could be "Spurned German contractor doesn't like the French!"
It's kind of different from proof of spying on heads of state, you know?
As I said: Breach of trust. Whatever you think they "should" know, it's clear some heads of state expected the US to actually stand by its word and not lie to their face about spying on them.
Spied. You had to go back 20+ years.
Sure, other nations have their skeletons in the closet too. But you know, it doesn't justify lying to them. If the Germans are such vile dogs as to deserve no privacy from the US, then let them know. Don't pretend you are the best of friends and would never consider such an act.
If there is no trust between you, very well, state that fact and let it be at that. But if you pretend there's trust, expect reactions when that trust is shown to be broken.
One thing is that as a private person she has a right to privacy just like you.
But she is also entrusted with an office. If you spy on her, you're also spying on that office, and trampling on the rights of the ones who put her there (the German public).
If your spouse betrays your trust in such a profound way as tapping your phone calls, then yes, you should consider "firing" them.
International diplomacy has been outside of democratic control for too long.
Did the reviewer play the game at all? "Surviving against a horde of enemies" is a pretty poor description of Minecraft survival mode, and in creative mode, you don't mine blocks to use them since you can get any block for free.
The nice thing about randomness though, is that it adds up. If you xor one stream of hopefully random bits with another stream of hopefully random bits, you get a result that is at least as random as the best of the two streams, quite possibly better than either. It's a rare and precious thing in cryptography: something you can't make worse by messing up. At worst you make no difference.
So if you're paranoid, come up personally with a ridiculously long phrase (you don't need to remember it), feed it through a key derivation function, and use it in a stream cipher with proven security guarantees (in particular one that passes the next-bit test for polynomial time). Instead of using this directly, xor it together with a source of hopefully random stuff.
If you write to /dev/random this is more or less what happens. Write to it to your heart's content - it can only make it better, not worse. (This is as I recall, please check with an independent source before you try).
Voila, no matter what NSA has done to your HRNG chip, this door is secured. Your time is better spent focusing on the other doors, or the windows.
(But you should be very careful in using HRNG output directly. I am very surprised to read that some open source OSes disable the stream cipher if a HRNG is present - this is a very bad idea!)
Who cares, they've found a way to make even more expensive headphones!
It would if we were interested in the botnet owner' profit margin. However, we're more interested in what costs the botnet owner impose on society in comparison to his private gains. Someone who would smash a $1000 computer to gain $1000 for himself is deemed less contemptible than the one would do it for $1 for himself.
That's not what exceptionalism means. Exceptionalism is when you say "other rules ought to apply to us, because obviously we're special". When the US supports trials of war criminals, but demands that their own forces can never be subject to war crimes inquiries, that's exceptionalism.
Some countries are relatively open about doing whatever they can get away with. Other countries justify it with an ideology of exceptionalism. US is one of the worst offenders in the latter category.
It's not crazy. Even if actually scrubbing all parts of your childhood actions from the internet is impossible, it can be made somewhat harder to seek out. This would send a signal to those who dig nonetheless, that what they're doing isn't OK. Especially not if they're employers. Legislation can't stop everyone from doing it, but it can help make it the norm to not do it.
Wouldn't it be nice if the west had the entire moral high ground on this? Considering iranian physicists and physics professors are murdered by foreign agents over a low shoe, you can't blame Iran for being paranoid.
How long does it have to take before we go from "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it" to "It's dead, Jim"?
This might come as a surprise to you, but taxi drivers (competing against Lyft, Uber) and bed & breakfast owners (competing against Airbnb) are not very powerful groups. It's mostly very small businesses. They are tightly regulated because they are so many, so small.
As to powerful entrenched interests, do you know who's funding these startups? Silicon Valley venture capital, for a large part. To say they have political connections in California would be an understatement.
Yes, it's the evil global taxi cartel, backed up by small businesses from Edinburgh to Portland! They fight to keep the regulation in place, against poor megacorporations and venture capital firms who only want what's best for you!
There's probably a reason taxi services and bed & breakfasts are so tightly regulated, despite being mostly very small businesses - and it isn't lobbying. The "sharing economy" companies want to replace this with their own rating systems and mandatory arbitration contracts.
Because it's the exciting new sharing economy, don't you know. I recommend googling Tom Slee and read a couple of his articles on the topic.
Oh I see, we get an Oracle shill to go with the Microsoft shill in the TFA.
But that is a cop-out. The extra information you need to get fidelity (comparable to a recording) is not contained in the score, it may only be imperfectly extracted from history and geography. As time passes, more and more information you could potentially extract from geography and history is lost forever.
I argue that it is often not, even with all the impromptu extensions composers invariably make up. I'm pretty sure whether it's Chopin or $modernist_of_choice, you could play it in a manner which is technically true to the score, but yet not at all something the composer would have wanted.
No, but if the researcher had been law enforcement rather than a mere graph-savvy computer scientist, they could find out. They would just monitor Forbes' mailbox (and maybe other likely delivery spots). Since they would know the Silk Road purchase happened as soon as it happened, they could be confident that something would drop into that mailbox.
Still, they only proved that Forbes had bought something at Silk Road. There are legal things being sold on silkroad too, and anyway the law is not indifferent to whether you bought cocaine or contraband.
The point at which Forbes would get in trouble, was when law enforcement matched a known purchase on silk road to a shipment to a known address. Bear in mind, they could be on watch for a mysterious package in the mail to Forbes, based on nothing more than what the researched uncovered in this case.
Not if you buy anything meaningful. If both parties in a trade are fully anonymous, and there is no intermediary, trust cannot exist. Either the buyer can avoid paying for the goods, or the seller can avoid actually delivering them.
(If I recall correctly, there may be some extremely few information goods which can be securely sold in this manner, namely proofs of hard mathematical statements. Then you can mess around with blind signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. But the most advanced people have managed to get out of that is decentralized mixing services, which is essentially what zerocoin is. Mixing services are economically unsound, so this won't have any impact.)
Now, if you conduct multiple trades there can be some limited trust (if we overlook the question of why anyone should trust you the very first time). But at that point, you've abandoned anonymity and settled for pseudonymity.
Hah! Far from it. All means of recording are lossy, but scores are far more lossy than even the simplest recording.
This is usually justified by claiming that what's not in the score is up to the performer's discretion. OK, fair enough, but that puts you at the mercy of your notation system - if you care about something hard to represent in notation, or don't care about something that is mandatory in the notation, you're out of luck. (Western classical music is terribly shaped by our notation).
Are you serious? Most people who try to learn it fail to some degree, and it's scarcely standardized - people are adding incompatible extensions all over the place. Plus, you've got to be impressed they could squeeze so many optical illusions into a notation system. As a developer, it's a classic example of the designers seeking job security!
Oh, the opportunities! But alas, I guess it's too late for a little covert vandalism of the Chopin wikipedia page.
Isn't Liszt the Steve Vai of Romanticism?