This pervasive sealing cripples public discussion of whether these judicial orders are lawful and appropriate.
Well of course it does. This is because they know very well that the orders are neither lawful nor appropriate...
It is impossible to determine that without actually reading (1) the orders (2) the information presented when they were requested, and (3) a substantial body of case law. And even then, there is still a chance we would need to make arguments in court and let a judge who has also done those things make a decision after we help them sort through the issues.
Just because we don't like the idea or it's a TERRIBLE idea from a security POV doesn't mean it's illegal.
You'll hear about it when real quantum computers reach commercial maturity, because a bunch of Slashdot articles will appear about how everyone is in a panic to rush and replace RSA with something else.:-)
"commercial maturity" being the key word here, because we should assume that significant portions of major classified intelligence budgets are being thrown at the problem by the US and China, maybe also by a few other players (India? Israel? The UK? Russia?). Like how it's widely believed that differential cryptanalysis was known to the NSA well before it became known to the world, only today encryption is much more prevalent and much more important to anyone doing signals analysis.
The real news here is that 32 *states* believe their IT is good enough to secure their infrastructure against cyberattacks by the best teams that the biggest nations of the world have been able to militarize. We're not talking about script kiddies here.
Even if the attackers only have a 2% chance of breaching any of those elections, you're talking about a 50% chance of at least one state election being compromised. Any state not having a verifiable paper trail as a backup is insane.
Age: This actor is so ancient they do not wish it displayed.
Actually, it sounds like this is how they have it set up. You need pro membership in order to suppress your age. So it's a way for IMDB to make money from people who face age discrimination and want to make their age a little less obvious to fans and potential employers.
Yes, but there is also a chance that a tree limb will fall on my car precisely as I am driving under it. And a chance I am Schrodinger's cat, dreaming of being me while waiting for someone to press a button.
The odds against the station landing in a crowd are pretty high. To get a simplified view of this, consider drawing a line in a circle around the earth and how many times it would hit a crowd.
But, if the speakers were knowledgeable individuals either working at Apple, or paid by Apple, then that goes all out the window. You don't stop racism by hiring someone just because of their skin color. You don't stop sexism by hiring someone based on their gender. I don't automatically get a job just because I'm a white male. I have to actually have the skills to do the job. Why should any other race/gender expect the same treatment?
That's not the point of programs that encourage diversity in the workplace. Nobody wants to hire somebody who is unskilled. What they want to do is encourage people to apply and make sure the workplace is welcoming to everyone. If the skilled people are minorities, that helps the public image because it *shows* that minorities are welcome in the workplace. And it is NOT a given that minorities are welcome in a workplace. While most employers want anybody really good who can work with their teams (because good people can be hard to find), that doesn't mean that the team will understand how to relate to the new person or that the new person won't face a hostile work environment. Sure, people can make mountains out of molehills, but there are also things that are mountains if you're on one side of them and molehills if you're on the other and if you're standing on the molehill side you don't realize that the other side goes down for miles.
If there are in fact other spacefaring civilizations out there in our galaxy, what would they think of us willy-nilly tossing our biologicals at random planets? Would they think we're smart and forward-thinking, or would they look at it as arrogant, self-centered, thoughtless, or hostile? Here on Earth (well, at least here in the U.S.) we expect Environment Impact studies done before real estate is developed, because we've learned that not doing so may cause us to do more harm than good. Why shouldn't we adopt the same policy with regard to exoplanets? Observe-and-report first, then consider carefully whether we do anything to 'develop' anything.
This is basically the same thing, it's just making the decision beforehand based on a set of conditions and having a computer make the final call according to those instructions. You could radio back for instructions, but that means an absolute minimum of another 8.6 years before you can begin the terraforming/seeding operation.
Any other rational civilization will look at it and say "these humans didn't know what they are doing, now let's go tell them how interplantary law works."
The problem is that one of two people - Clinton or Trump - is going to end up as President. While neither of them is particularly likable you have to consider all the judges that they will appoint, all of the cabinet secretaries that they wil appoint, etc. All of those people have a big influence on the direction of the country albeit less obviously that the President.
If you live outside a swing state, feel free to vote a third party, just don't tell your friends in swing states to vote that way. But focus more of your attention on down-ballot races where your votes count.
If you live in a swing state, you are directly responsible for deciding on any delta between the two major candidates, and failing to vote or voting for a third party if you see ANY difference between the two viable candidates--no matter how small--makes you responsible for the winner in areas where they differ.
It's like choosing between hiring 2 doctors to provide health care to ten million people or hiring 3. Yes, it might be much better to hire 100, but if you say 100 your vote doesn't count, so you should hire 3 doctors, even though people die because you don't hire more. If you say you should hire 100 when you otherwise would have supported hiring 3, then you are supporting the people who want to hire 2 doctors, and your choice ended the lives that doctor #3 would have saved.
On other parts of the internet there is a lot of skepticism about China's stated goals for this facility. It smells strongly of manganese nodule harvesting and many analysts think it has a military or intelligence purpose instead. The details that have been released are so sketchy it's hard to believe that it's a legitimate scientific facility, but I guess it's not impossible.
It smells strongly of several things--Intelligence use (e.g. an undersea SOSUS-type hub), military use (becoming masters of the deep sea has massive military implications, especially in an age when satellites can see ships), anti-extinction use (create a self-contained environment in the ocean and you have a facility very well-isolated from the rest of the world), continuity-of-government use, and general distraction (nationalist militaristic projects are great at distracting your population and adversaries from whatever you are actually doing that is more important to you).
His concern isn't entirely unjustified. We're increasingly relying on robots to do the actual killing, but we've currently designed the systems so that humans need to be involved in the decision making.
Forget the military drones. (Or at least, they're a smaller component of the overall issue.)
We have computer-controlled cars. They will be deployed in massive numbers over the next ten years. If remote updates are possible, anyone who can update a popular model has access to a distributed weapon of mass destruction capable of causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in a matter of moments.
Warfare-oriented tech isn't the only vector for mass attacks.
if Hillary looses, you can be sure the left will point the finger at Russia. Any election the left looses is automatically "Unfair!".
It's not about left or right; it's about the process. Both sides are happy to manipulate electoral math in any way which helps them--this is the ONLY reason states still use winner-take-all allocation in the electoral college, for example.
The process should be managed very carefully and respectfully, and should at the least allow paper recounts of any electronic votes.
Yes. Every Corporation has a board, as a matter of state law pretty much everywhere. The board has a legal obligation to use reasonable business judgment, which gives them a lot of leeway. (Basically because the courts don't want to be involved in running a corporation).
This is compounded by the fact that the courts, which are charged (by themselves, but that's a different problem of very long standing) with making sure that laws that are not compliant with the constitution are struck down, consistently do not do so.
The courts do so rarely, and avoid it if the law gives them a way to avoid it. For example, if it is possible to read a law in a way that would make it constitutional, they will do so (which may still restrict what the government can do with it.)
And there's a reason for that. Courts always walk a very fine line. The police do not work for them. The army does not work for them. Government officials, by and large, do not work for them. Criminal defendants do not work for them. The power of a court is directly dependent on whether people are willing to listen to it--very much like the old rule that a King can should NEVER make an order that will not be obeyed.
There are also more direct checks and balances. Congress can excuse laws from judicial review if it wants to, for example. The Constitution can also be changed to make a law constitutional--as has happened a number of times in United States History.
And, of course, the judgment of history will come down very heavily on certain decisions, in a way it almost never does on any Congress or even President--Dred Scott and Korematsu being the most obvious.
The Courts are very powerful, but they are also very cautious. (Anything you may have read about too many "activist judges" is primarily ignorant or intentionally misleading commentary aimed at manipulating voters.)
What evidence do you have that you can travel faster than the speed of light? If you have evidence of it, then produce it. Einstein said it isn't possible. Do you know better? Welcome to reality. Reality isn't Star Trek.
Absolutely none, and it is not possible according to current models.
However, maybe those models are incomplete. For example, maybe the universe is a simulation and someone exists outside of it capable of mucking about with it. Or perhaps we will discover how to create a buffer overflow.
Notice they always shove "NASA" in there as if it lends it any credibility. The truth is that anyone can rent "NASA" lab facilities. This is just another hoax. Also, it "soon will be published" in AIAA. Uh huh. Sure it will.
Even if it were from NASA, that wouldn't be a massive credibility boost. NASA, like many other great places, has amazing people and meh people.
When law enforcement agencies in the USA think "parallel construction" of the source of their evidence is acceptable or justifiable. Maybe if they hadn't be so underhanded and dirty in the first place, people might believe in them.
This is a third of the problem, and the third they really don't understand. I don't believe there's even been an apology for mass surveillance, just rationalizations and more-of-the-same and parlor tricks like pretending it was meaningfully helpful to make the telcos rather than the government maintain surveillance databases.
There is also the tech problem. If the encryption is breakable because your friends have a secret key, your enemies are going to make that secret key their #1 priority. If you share that secret key with your friends at the NSA, now your enemies have at least two places they can try to social engineer, crack, etc... that secret key from.
And then there is the legal problem, where it is hard to have effective legal accountability for law enforcement under any conditions, but it's harder still when dealing with secret government actions and mass warrants.
People absorbed in their portables, unaware of what's happening around them. Pickpocket heaven!
Yes, but the delta between 4.1 million people who aren't paying attention and 4.2 million people who aren't paying attention doesn't exactly change whether it's a target-rich environment.
(over 4.3 million people ride the subway every day, according to Google.)
If it's not legal to shoot down drones flying over your property, then people will take the next logical step of simply shooting the drone operators so there is no-one to complain... which is what I expected to happen when a bunch of morons started yelling at an armed 83 year old woman who had already demonstrated herself to be a crack shot at long distance.
She is 83, not crazy. If a bunch of people send a drone at an armed 83-year-old woman, she may shoot it, but she is very unlikely to shoot them unless they actually threaten her. She is probably sensible enough to call their mothers.
What's next? Are they gonna try to put a robot on Mars?
Day 1: Robot lands on moon
Day 2: 23-year-old recompiles the kernel. Brags to his mother.
Day 3: 23-year-old's mother apt-get installs fortune and begins "astrology that's truly out of this world" business
Day 36028: Moon-Singularity with superior position in gravity well accidentally runs fortune, gets distracted from external universe in a fit of angst, and allows humanity to survive.
I'm seeing this is just about every form of crime outside of petty theft among the poor (e.g. when they keep it in their own neighborhood so nobody can be arsed to investigate). Give it another 10-20 years and the only crimes left will be the occasional breakin at some poor slobs apartment that nets $100 bucks worth of junk, a few crimes of passion and the legal crime Wallstreet does because we don't have the bollocks to regulate anymore.
"A few" crimes of passion? Spend one day in a courtroom listening to domestic violence cases. Big data can help fight crime, but crime isn't going away without more profound societal changes. Fundamentally, we need to create enough legal opportunity for everyone, we need to raise people better, we need to provide much better social training to everyone, and that's just a part of it. Big data can help with that, but it's not going to magically "solve" crime by helping you arrest people.
Generally I don't think they should be doing this because of the potential for abuse, but there actually *ARE* reasons why it could be used in ways which are not really privacy invasive.
The Visa Waiver Program allows stays of up to 90 days. After 80 days, if you have not left the country they could use your social media for a friendly reminder. It might help someone who was going to overstay feel like someone is paying attention and that they have to follow the visa law, and reduce the number of people overstaying their stay in the United States.
In my mind, that's creating a fake profile, and pretending to be someone else. In my opinion, a specious use of the phrase "Man in the Middle" because at no point has party A or party C confirmed their identities.
They have confirmed their identity against a fake Facebook account. Technically it is a man-in-the-middle attack, it's just so primitive it looks like cheating.
Kind of like when you write code to implement TCP over voice. (Basically re-inventing the modem, but slower and over an airgap!) Technically the two machines are networked with TCP, but it still feels like cheating.
Slashdot Mirror
This pervasive sealing cripples public discussion of whether these judicial orders are lawful and appropriate.
Well of course it does. This is because they know very well that the orders are neither lawful nor appropriate...
It is impossible to determine that without actually reading (1) the orders (2) the information presented when they were requested, and (3) a substantial body of case law. And even then, there is still a chance we would need to make arguments in court and let a judge who has also done those things make a decision after we help them sort through the issues.
Just because we don't like the idea or it's a TERRIBLE idea from a security POV doesn't mean it's illegal.
You'll hear about it when real quantum computers reach commercial maturity, because a bunch of Slashdot articles will appear about how everyone is in a panic to rush and replace RSA with something else. :-)
"commercial maturity" being the key word here, because we should assume that significant portions of major classified intelligence budgets are being thrown at the problem by the US and China, maybe also by a few other players (India? Israel? The UK? Russia?). Like how it's widely believed that differential cryptanalysis was known to the NSA well before it became known to the world, only today encryption is much more prevalent and much more important to anyone doing signals analysis.
The first Mars colony is always wiped out. It's the second one that thrives -- after 90% of the colonists are wiped out.
So what you're saying is that Mars is a VC firm and the colonies are startups?
The real news here is that 32 *states* believe their IT is good enough to secure their infrastructure against cyberattacks by the best teams that the biggest nations of the world have been able to militarize. We're not talking about script kiddies here.
Even if the attackers only have a 2% chance of breaching any of those elections, you're talking about a 50% chance of at least one state election being compromised. Any state not having a verifiable paper trail as a backup is insane.
Instead of displaying age:
Age: This actor is so ancient they do not wish it displayed.
Actually, it sounds like this is how they have it set up. You need pro membership in order to suppress your age. So it's a way for IMDB to make money from people who face age discrimination and want to make their age a little less obvious to fans and potential employers.
Yes, but there is also a chance that a tree limb will fall on my car precisely as I am driving under it. And a chance I am Schrodinger's cat, dreaming of being me while waiting for someone to press a button.
The odds against the station landing in a crowd are pretty high. To get a simplified view of this, consider drawing a line in a circle around the earth and how many times it would hit a crowd.
But, if the speakers were knowledgeable individuals either working at Apple, or paid by Apple, then that goes all out the window. You don't stop racism by hiring someone just because of their skin color. You don't stop sexism by hiring someone based on their gender. I don't automatically get a job just because I'm a white male. I have to actually have the skills to do the job. Why should any other race/gender expect the same treatment?
That's not the point of programs that encourage diversity in the workplace. Nobody wants to hire somebody who is unskilled. What they want to do is encourage people to apply and make sure the workplace is welcoming to everyone. If the skilled people are minorities, that helps the public image because it *shows* that minorities are welcome in the workplace. And it is NOT a given that minorities are welcome in a workplace. While most employers want anybody really good who can work with their teams (because good people can be hard to find), that doesn't mean that the team will understand how to relate to the new person or that the new person won't face a hostile work environment. Sure, people can make mountains out of molehills, but there are also things that are mountains if you're on one side of them and molehills if you're on the other and if you're standing on the molehill side you don't realize that the other side goes down for miles.
If there are in fact other spacefaring civilizations out there in our galaxy, what would they think of us willy-nilly tossing our biologicals at random planets? Would they think we're smart and forward-thinking, or would they look at it as arrogant, self-centered, thoughtless, or hostile? Here on Earth (well, at least here in the U.S.) we expect Environment Impact studies done before real estate is developed, because we've learned that not doing so may cause us to do more harm than good. Why shouldn't we adopt the same policy with regard to exoplanets? Observe-and-report first, then consider carefully whether we do anything to 'develop' anything.
This is basically the same thing, it's just making the decision beforehand based on a set of conditions and having a computer make the final call according to those instructions. You could radio back for instructions, but that means an absolute minimum of another 8.6 years before you can begin the terraforming/seeding operation.
Any other rational civilization will look at it and say "these humans didn't know what they are doing, now let's go tell them how interplantary law works."
In this day and age, a device with telnet and no password is fundamentally a defective product.
The problem is that one of two people - Clinton or Trump - is going to end up as President. While neither of them is particularly likable you have to consider all the judges that they will appoint, all of the cabinet secretaries that they wil appoint, etc. All of those people have a big influence on the direction of the country albeit less obviously that the President.
If you live outside a swing state, feel free to vote a third party, just don't tell your friends in swing states to vote that way. But focus more of your attention on down-ballot races where your votes count.
If you live in a swing state, you are directly responsible for deciding on any delta between the two major candidates, and failing to vote or voting for a third party if you see ANY difference between the two viable candidates--no matter how small--makes you responsible for the winner in areas where they differ.
It's like choosing between hiring 2 doctors to provide health care to ten million people or hiring 3. Yes, it might be much better to hire 100, but if you say 100 your vote doesn't count, so you should hire 3 doctors, even though people die because you don't hire more. If you say you should hire 100 when you otherwise would have supported hiring 3, then you are supporting the people who want to hire 2 doctors, and your choice ended the lives that doctor #3 would have saved.
On other parts of the internet there is a lot of skepticism about China's stated goals for this facility. It smells strongly of manganese nodule harvesting and many analysts think it has a military or intelligence purpose instead. The details that have been released are so sketchy it's hard to believe that it's a legitimate scientific facility, but I guess it's not impossible.
It smells strongly of several things--Intelligence use (e.g. an undersea SOSUS-type hub), military use (becoming masters of the deep sea has massive military implications, especially in an age when satellites can see ships), anti-extinction use (create a self-contained environment in the ocean and you have a facility very well-isolated from the rest of the world), continuity-of-government use, and general distraction (nationalist militaristic projects are great at distracting your population and adversaries from whatever you are actually doing that is more important to you).
His concern isn't entirely unjustified. We're increasingly relying on robots to do the actual killing, but we've currently designed the systems so that humans need to be involved in the decision making.
Forget the military drones. (Or at least, they're a smaller component of the overall issue.)
We have computer-controlled cars. They will be deployed in massive numbers over the next ten years. If remote updates are possible, anyone who can update a popular model has access to a distributed weapon of mass destruction capable of causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in a matter of moments.
Warfare-oriented tech isn't the only vector for mass attacks.
if Hillary looses, you can be sure the left will point the finger at Russia. Any election the left looses is automatically "Unfair!".
It's not about left or right; it's about the process. Both sides are happy to manipulate electoral math in any way which helps them--this is the ONLY reason states still use winner-take-all allocation in the electoral college, for example.
The process should be managed very carefully and respectfully, and should at the least allow paper recounts of any electronic votes.
Yes. Every Corporation has a board, as a matter of state law pretty much everywhere. The board has a legal obligation to use reasonable business judgment, which gives them a lot of leeway. (Basically because the courts don't want to be involved in running a corporation).
This is compounded by the fact that the courts, which are charged (by themselves, but that's a different problem of very long standing) with making sure that laws that are not compliant with the constitution are struck down, consistently do not do so.
The courts do so rarely, and avoid it if the law gives them a way to avoid it. For example, if it is possible to read a law in a way that would make it constitutional, they will do so (which may still restrict what the government can do with it.)
And there's a reason for that. Courts always walk a very fine line. The police do not work for them. The army does not work for them. Government officials, by and large, do not work for them. Criminal defendants do not work for them. The power of a court is directly dependent on whether people are willing to listen to it--very much like the old rule that a King can should NEVER make an order that will not be obeyed.
There are also more direct checks and balances. Congress can excuse laws from judicial review if it wants to, for example. The Constitution can also be changed to make a law constitutional--as has happened a number of times in United States History.
And, of course, the judgment of history will come down very heavily on certain decisions, in a way it almost never does on any Congress or even President--Dred Scott and Korematsu being the most obvious.
The Courts are very powerful, but they are also very cautious. (Anything you may have read about too many "activist judges" is primarily ignorant or intentionally misleading commentary aimed at manipulating voters.)
What evidence do you have that you can travel faster than the speed of light? If you have evidence of it, then produce it. Einstein said it isn't possible. Do you know better? Welcome to reality. Reality isn't Star Trek.
Absolutely none, and it is not possible according to current models.
However, maybe those models are incomplete. For example, maybe the universe is a simulation and someone exists outside of it capable of mucking about with it. Or perhaps we will discover how to create a buffer overflow.
OpenBSD? Good Heavens! It's still around?
What have you used it for lately?
Notice they always shove "NASA" in there as if it lends it any credibility. The truth is that anyone can rent "NASA" lab facilities. This is just another hoax. Also, it "soon will be published" in AIAA. Uh huh. Sure it will.
Even if it were from NASA, that wouldn't be a massive credibility boost. NASA, like many other great places, has amazing people and meh people.
The question is the science.
When law enforcement agencies in the USA think "parallel construction" of the source of their evidence is acceptable or justifiable. Maybe if they hadn't be so underhanded and dirty in the first place, people might believe in them.
This is a third of the problem, and the third they really don't understand. I don't believe there's even been an apology for mass surveillance, just rationalizations and more-of-the-same and parlor tricks like pretending it was meaningfully helpful to make the telcos rather than the government maintain surveillance databases.
There is also the tech problem. If the encryption is breakable because your friends have a secret key, your enemies are going to make that secret key their #1 priority. If you share that secret key with your friends at the NSA, now your enemies have at least two places they can try to social engineer, crack, etc... that secret key from.
And then there is the legal problem, where it is hard to have effective legal accountability for law enforcement under any conditions, but it's harder still when dealing with secret government actions and mass warrants.
People absorbed in their portables, unaware of what's happening around them.
Pickpocket heaven!
Yes, but the delta between 4.1 million people who aren't paying attention and 4.2 million people who aren't paying attention doesn't exactly change whether it's a target-rich environment.
(over 4.3 million people ride the subway every day, according to Google.)
If it's not legal to shoot down drones flying over your property, then people will take the next logical step of simply shooting the drone operators so there is no-one to complain... which is what I expected to happen when a bunch of morons started yelling at an armed 83 year old woman who had already demonstrated herself to be a crack shot at long distance.
She is 83, not crazy. If a bunch of people send a drone at an armed 83-year-old woman, she may shoot it, but she is very unlikely to shoot them unless they actually threaten her. She is probably sensible enough to call their mothers.
What's next? Are they gonna try to put a robot on Mars?
Day 1: Robot lands on moon
Day 2: 23-year-old recompiles the kernel. Brags to his mother.
Day 3: 23-year-old's mother apt-get installs fortune and begins "astrology that's truly out of this world" business
Day 36028: Moon-Singularity with superior position in gravity well accidentally runs fortune, gets distracted from external universe in a fit of angst, and allows humanity to survive.
I'm seeing this is just about every form of crime outside of petty theft among the poor (e.g. when they keep it in their own neighborhood so nobody can be arsed to investigate). Give it another 10-20 years and the only crimes left will be the occasional breakin at some poor slobs apartment that nets $100 bucks worth of junk, a few crimes of passion and the legal crime Wallstreet does because we don't have the bollocks to regulate anymore.
"A few" crimes of passion? Spend one day in a courtroom listening to domestic violence cases. Big data can help fight crime, but crime isn't going away without more profound societal changes. Fundamentally, we need to create enough legal opportunity for everyone, we need to raise people better, we need to provide much better social training to everyone, and that's just a part of it. Big data can help with that, but it's not going to magically "solve" crime by helping you arrest people.
Generally I don't think they should be doing this because of the potential for abuse, but there actually *ARE* reasons why it could be used in ways which are not really privacy invasive.
The Visa Waiver Program allows stays of up to 90 days. After 80 days, if you have not left the country they could use your social media for a friendly reminder. It might help someone who was going to overstay feel like someone is paying attention and that they have to follow the visa law, and reduce the number of people overstaying their stay in the United States.
In my mind, that's creating a fake profile, and pretending to be someone else. In my opinion, a specious use of the phrase "Man in the Middle" because at no point has party A or party C confirmed their identities.
They have confirmed their identity against a fake Facebook account. Technically it is a man-in-the-middle attack, it's just so primitive it looks like cheating.
Kind of like when you write code to implement TCP over voice. (Basically re-inventing the modem, but slower and over an airgap!) Technically the two machines are networked with TCP, but it still feels like cheating.