These pictures are half-assed photoshops, they do not come for real measurement, they do not vizualise anything. They give an "artistic rendition", and a fake one that is. In the real world, radio waves do not cross a wall or a window the same way, they bounce back, they resonate...
If you want to see a cruder yet more information-bearing representation of a wifi signal's attenuation, check this instead:
http://hackaday.com/2011/03/02/how-to-find-wifi-carry-a-big-stick-and-use-long-exposures/
But guys on reddit had a good point : reddit.com/r/sex/ and reddit.com/r/lgbt/ are already blocked by UK mobile ISPs, they will probably be on the new blocking list. Yet these are not pornographic, they are about discussing about sex practices and advices for the first one, and about the lgbt problems and identity. These two things would have been invaluable resources for me as a teen. Blocking these are harmful to the children.
It is even harder to influence the US government when you are not a US citizen. The first governmental reaction to the PRISM revelations has been "We are only spying non-americans, so it is OK". Here in Europe, it has not been received very well...
I apparently can't opt out of PRISM, even through democratic means. I did opt out of Facebook, but I still have many contacts who send or receive mails through gmail accounts. I still need to hop on US routers to access some contents. This is pervasive and mandatory.
You say it like not giving an incentive to change your phone is an undesirable effect to the seller...
Note as well that XP legacy computers were a problem for all the case where the computer was part of a critical system. It is arguably far less frequent for smartphones.
Actually, by accepting that other people fork it, I do think that authors grant the implicit right to distribute it and produce derivative work. Their terms of use is a licence on its own. It would be very interesting to see how it is understood by a tribunal. "Forking" can be seen as implying copying, modifying it and distributing it. I welcome their move to push for licences, but I do think that they were already subtely pushing for a "kind-of" licence.
Actually I do think that he was just clueless. I buy his story that he was naive enough to not know about the extent of NSA's surveillance program until he worked for them.
In 2001, EU made a memorandum about ECHELON and encouraged EU company to use strong encryption, as they suspected Boeing received confidential "internal" emails of Airbus through the network.
What happened? We jumped like sheeps in the "counterterrorist" bandwagon, not caring that our privacy was raped.
Give it 6 months of bad memory and PR spining and no one will remember this. See what people remember from wikileaks.
More people were protesting than had voted for the president
Says the army. Don't get it wrong, I think that this coup was probably necessary, but when the only source for a number is the group that uses it as a justification, you need to be very cautious.
The number of 14 millions is really hard to believe. The urban population of Egypt is 35 millions. You don't bring children and need to be minimally physically fit to go to protests. All the pictures I see show a predominantly male crowd (90+%) so half of the population can't be there. Even if they are a minority, there are people who still support Morsi. The numbers do not add up, 14 millions is an impossibility.
Easy : mines. We leave evidences of machining in dry caves on the hardest of rocks. In some places, erosion could end up erasing the traces, but a man-made tunnel in a solid rock will still look like one in one million years.
We are also responsible for an extinction event that will have a very clear gap in the fossil records.
Radioactive dumps will not be very active in 5 millions years but they still will be very detectable, and as they are made from resistant materials, their artificial nature will surely be evident.
I agree to a big extent to what you said. Actually, for a long time, my father's garage had better tools than my local hackerspace. Then, their community grw and they now have a big-ass CNCs, several 3D printers and a nice laser cuter.
I think that the main difference is the idea of sharing designs and making open hardware. When my grandfather repaired a pump with a nifty trick and two screws, he did it once, never told to anyone. Now when a member in a hackerspace unbricks an obscure flashable wifi router to make a pirate box, he publishes the howto on internet.
There is also the thing about being located inside cities. Having a spare room for tools is common in the countryside, but in cities, it is harder to do. But cities are also the place where you are the most likely to find kindred spirits.
Makerspaces do not come from nowhere, there is a long tradition of shared workshops in the past, it is just a meaningful evolution of the concept when they are networked through internet and share some values.
Linus is thinking otherwise : "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it"
Actually, the cloud is perfect for any open development.
The problem is that, if IRS is anything like France's FISC, they receive information from various sources, some (most?) of them anonymous. When you receive information from, apparently, three different source, telling you that for instance the Mozilla Foundation is engaging in a precise kind of scheme or illegal tax evasion, it can be normal to inquire.
This is not a judicial process, this is something guided by the guts feeling of the members of this administration. Yes, it can be used to hide some agenda but I am not sure there is a perfect system to manage anonymous clues. I would say that inquiries are totally normal, and should not be taken as a suspicion of a wrong doing, just a normal check.
Nothing to do with backdoors? Excuse me? This would allow an attacker to disguise a trojan as a legitimate update. On some windows machines, this could mean silent updating of the trojan.
Schneier "doesn't buy it" because:
if the NSA wanted to compromise Microsoft's Crypto API, it would be much easier to either 1) convince MS to tell them the secret key for MS's signature key, 2) get MS to sign an NSA-compromised module, or 3) install a module other than Crypto API to break the encryption (no other modules need signatures). It's always easier to break good encryption by attacking the random number generator than it is to brute-force the key.
I don't see how he imagines 1) would look like. Having their own key is more or less that. It is not harder or easier this way. By the way, OP asked about a clue that MS may be providing NSA with backdoors, I agree that this is not a definite proof, but the arguments against it are really not convincing, sorry.
I'll also add a point about another argument that many people made here as well:
why in the world would anyone call a secret NSA key "NSAKEY"? Lots of people have access to source code within Microsoft; a conspiracy like this would only be known by a few people. Anyone with a debugger could have found this "NSAKEY." If this is a covert mechanism, it's not very covert.
First, it is worth noticing that this became apparent when Microsoft erroneously released a binary with debugging symbols activated. Before that, only MS internal developers had access to the code. It is an internal MS developpers who named this variable. We are talking about Microsoft in 1999. Saying they were not very good at this security thing is a litote (and incidentaly another argument of Schneier for not buying this backdoor story is that windows security was such a joke as the time).
In 1999, it was not considered a conspiration that the government could be able to break cryptographies. It was considered arms export to sell cryptographic software. Having the NSA impose some regulations would be seen as totally normal. Remember that before 2000, most software could not contain crypto algorithms using keys longer than 40 bits, so that the NSA could break it.
I personally believe that the NSAKEY is what it looks like : a key provided to the NSA. I agree that it can be debatted. What is, however, totally silly as an opinion, is to believe that the NSA did not use to its advantage the huge legal restriction that existed at the time on cryptography to improve it interception abilities.
If I am tinfoiled paranoid, I am not alone : the Chinese government refused to use windows unless they were provided with the source code as well. Which they did obtain and audited. They openly suspected backdoors to exist.
Seriously, imagine the situation : you are the head of the NSA, the OS used on most of the world's computers is made by a company that you can easily and legally blackmail into cooperation. It would be gross incompetence to not do it.
They put iOS and Android in the same "do not trust" column. The only difference is that for Android phones, they are able to recommend alternatives : Replicant and CyanogenMod. While not perfect, these are by far better alternatives.
Yes : the whole NSA key debacle. You are free to choose to believe Microsoft denegations that the item they called _NSAKEY is a key they gave to the NSA. This is not the kind of smoking guns Snowden provided, but I do think this qualifies as "something that suggests they put in back doors into software."
Geeks have been very vocal about wiretapping issues for a LONG time. Does ECHELON ring any bell? Geeks have created institutions like the EFF, tools like Tor, GPG, darknets, bittorrent, bitcoin. It is true that few people use them, and it is true as well that they allow a truly anonymous internet that escapes even NSA surveillance. I refuse that because you are too lazy to get an interest in these free tools you pretend that these problems are met with indifference in the tech community. Reality could not be further from the truth.
People making most of these tools did this for free. When was the last time you did spend money in order to protect your privacy or anonymity? The market of surveillance is several dozens of billions of dollars yearly. The market of consumer counter-surveillance is almost inexistent. Yet, effective tools that are very easy to use exist. Don't forget to thank the geeks that have known for decades that the NSA was spying on you, found it immoral and spent years working gratis to provide you for free an excellent tool.
Geeks employed at several levels at ISP do all that they can to keep internet free and neutral. The fact that regular internet is quite free (compared for instance with what you usuall get on your 3G smartphone) is due in large part because geeks in their majority have a strong ethical sense and know the value of openness. Snowden and Assange are geeks, but if you look at the HBGary leaks, you will see that developpers strongly opposed some policies. Whistleblowers about surveillance are almost always geeks involved in the infrastructure. Never legislators, managers, officiers, who know as well the extent of the surveillance.
Debian provides binaries but their binaries are automatically compiled from sources. If you are unable to create a source package that compiles correctly, it cannot be part of debian.
Slashdot Mirror
These pictures are half-assed photoshops, they do not come for real measurement, they do not vizualise anything. They give an "artistic rendition", and a fake one that is. In the real world, radio waves do not cross a wall or a window the same way, they bounce back, they resonate... If you want to see a cruder yet more information-bearing representation of a wifi signal's attenuation, check this instead: http://hackaday.com/2011/03/02/how-to-find-wifi-carry-a-big-stick-and-use-long-exposures/
But guys on reddit had a good point : reddit.com/r/sex/ and reddit.com/r/lgbt/ are already blocked by UK mobile ISPs, they will probably be on the new blocking list. Yet these are not pornographic, they are about discussing about sex practices and advices for the first one, and about the lgbt problems and identity. These two things would have been invaluable resources for me as a teen. Blocking these are harmful to the children.
It is even harder to influence the US government when you are not a US citizen. The first governmental reaction to the PRISM revelations has been "We are only spying non-americans, so it is OK". Here in Europe, it has not been received very well...
I apparently can't opt out of PRISM, even through democratic means. I did opt out of Facebook, but I still have many contacts who send or receive mails through gmail accounts. I still need to hop on US routers to access some contents. This is pervasive and mandatory.
That was my first thought. When did we stop calling these nanosized particles "dust" and "smoke" ?
You say it like not giving an incentive to change your phone is an undesirable effect to the seller...
Note as well that XP legacy computers were a problem for all the case where the computer was part of a critical system. It is arguably far less frequent for smartphones.
Actually, by accepting that other people fork it, I do think that authors grant the implicit right to distribute it and produce derivative work. Their terms of use is a licence on its own. It would be very interesting to see how it is understood by a tribunal. "Forking" can be seen as implying copying, modifying it and distributing it. I welcome their move to push for licences, but I do think that they were already subtely pushing for a "kind-of" licence.
Actually I do think that he was just clueless. I buy his story that he was naive enough to not know about the extent of NSA's surveillance program until he worked for them.
Snowden leaks had zero utility and zero consquences yet. Assange is still waiting his for being harassed for doign a journalist's job.
And they are not moderated "funny" anymore.
In 2001, EU made a memorandum about ECHELON and encouraged EU company to use strong encryption, as they suspected Boeing received confidential "internal" emails of Airbus through the network.
What happened? We jumped like sheeps in the "counterterrorist" bandwagon, not caring that our privacy was raped.
Give it 6 months of bad memory and PR spining and no one will remember this. See what people remember from wikileaks.
More people were protesting than had voted for the president
Says the army. Don't get it wrong, I think that this coup was probably necessary, but when the only source for a number is the group that uses it as a justification, you need to be very cautious.
The number of 14 millions is really hard to believe. The urban population of Egypt is 35 millions. You don't bring children and need to be minimally physically fit to go to protests. All the pictures I see show a predominantly male crowd (90+%) so half of the population can't be there. Even if they are a minority, there are people who still support Morsi. The numbers do not add up, 14 millions is an impossibility.
I used wire transfers to MtGox.
If windows 8 had the ability to turn off metro, it would be just like windows 7 with a few improvements, rather than a disaster.
And it would be hard to justify this being an update to most Microsoft clients.
Easy : mines. We leave evidences of machining in dry caves on the hardest of rocks. In some places, erosion could end up erasing the traces, but a man-made tunnel in a solid rock will still look like one in one million years.
We are also responsible for an extinction event that will have a very clear gap in the fossil records.
Radioactive dumps will not be very active in 5 millions years but they still will be very detectable, and as they are made from resistant materials, their artificial nature will surely be evident.
I agree to a big extent to what you said. Actually, for a long time, my father's garage had better tools than my local hackerspace. Then, their community grw and they now have a big-ass CNCs, several 3D printers and a nice laser cuter.
I think that the main difference is the idea of sharing designs and making open hardware. When my grandfather repaired a pump with a nifty trick and two screws, he did it once, never told to anyone. Now when a member in a hackerspace unbricks an obscure flashable wifi router to make a pirate box, he publishes the howto on internet.
There is also the thing about being located inside cities. Having a spare room for tools is common in the countryside, but in cities, it is harder to do. But cities are also the place where you are the most likely to find kindred spirits.
Makerspaces do not come from nowhere, there is a long tradition of shared workshops in the past, it is just a meaningful evolution of the concept when they are networked through internet and share some values.
but how many parts were made in China?
Linus is thinking otherwise : "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it"
Actually, the cloud is perfect for any open development.
The problem is that, if IRS is anything like France's FISC, they receive information from various sources, some (most?) of them anonymous. When you receive information from, apparently, three different source, telling you that for instance the Mozilla Foundation is engaging in a precise kind of scheme or illegal tax evasion, it can be normal to inquire.
This is not a judicial process, this is something guided by the guts feeling of the members of this administration. Yes, it can be used to hide some agenda but I am not sure there is a perfect system to manage anonymous clues. I would say that inquiries are totally normal, and should not be taken as a suspicion of a wrong doing, just a normal check.
"Hey, look Julian! I am in a plane!"
"Fuck you, just wait that I get elected and get my out-of-jail card"
Schneier "doesn't buy it" because
if the NSA wanted to compromise Microsoft's Crypto API, it would be much easier to either 1) convince MS to tell them the secret key for MS's signature key, 2) get MS to sign an NSA-compromised module, or 3) install a module other than Crypto API to break the encryption (no other modules need signatures). It's always easier to break good encryption by attacking the random number generator than it is to brute-force the key.
I don't see how he imagines 1) would look like. Having their own key is more or less that. It is not harder or easier this way. By the way, OP asked about a clue that MS may be providing NSA with backdoors, I agree that this is not a definite proof, but the arguments against it are really not convincing, sorry. I'll also add a point about another argument that many people made here as well :
why in the world would anyone call a secret NSA key "NSAKEY"? Lots of people have access to source code within Microsoft; a conspiracy like this would only be known by a few people. Anyone with a debugger could have found this "NSAKEY." If this is a covert mechanism, it's not very covert.
First, it is worth noticing that this became apparent when Microsoft erroneously released a binary with debugging symbols activated. Before that, only MS internal developers had access to the code. It is an internal MS developpers who named this variable. We are talking about Microsoft in 1999. Saying they were not very good at this security thing is a litote (and incidentaly another argument of Schneier for not buying this backdoor story is that windows security was such a joke as the time).
In 1999, it was not considered a conspiration that the government could be able to break cryptographies. It was considered arms export to sell cryptographic software. Having the NSA impose some regulations would be seen as totally normal. Remember that before 2000, most software could not contain crypto algorithms using keys longer than 40 bits, so that the NSA could break it.
I personally believe that the NSAKEY is what it looks like : a key provided to the NSA. I agree that it can be debatted. What is, however, totally silly as an opinion, is to believe that the NSA did not use to its advantage the huge legal restriction that existed at the time on cryptography to improve it interception abilities.
If I am tinfoiled paranoid, I am not alone : the Chinese government refused to use windows unless they were provided with the source code as well. Which they did obtain and audited. They openly suspected backdoors to exist.
Seriously, imagine the situation : you are the head of the NSA, the OS used on most of the world's computers is made by a company that you can easily and legally blackmail into cooperation. It would be gross incompetence to not do it.
If Jesus only used Tor to give sermons, he could not have been betrayed by Judas.
They recommend self-hosted worpress.
They put iOS and Android in the same "do not trust" column. The only difference is that for Android phones, they are able to recommend alternatives : Replicant and CyanogenMod. While not perfect, these are by far better alternatives.
Yes : the whole NSA key debacle. You are free to choose to believe Microsoft denegations that the item they called _NSAKEY is a key they gave to the NSA. This is not the kind of smoking guns Snowden provided, but I do think this qualifies as "something that suggests they put in back doors into software."
Ok, now you are getting me angry.
Geeks have been very vocal about wiretapping issues for a LONG time. Does ECHELON ring any bell? Geeks have created institutions like the EFF, tools like Tor, GPG, darknets, bittorrent, bitcoin. It is true that few people use them, and it is true as well that they allow a truly anonymous internet that escapes even NSA surveillance. I refuse that because you are too lazy to get an interest in these free tools you pretend that these problems are met with indifference in the tech community. Reality could not be further from the truth.
People making most of these tools did this for free. When was the last time you did spend money in order to protect your privacy or anonymity? The market of surveillance is several dozens of billions of dollars yearly. The market of consumer counter-surveillance is almost inexistent. Yet, effective tools that are very easy to use exist. Don't forget to thank the geeks that have known for decades that the NSA was spying on you, found it immoral and spent years working gratis to provide you for free an excellent tool.
Geeks employed at several levels at ISP do all that they can to keep internet free and neutral. The fact that regular internet is quite free (compared for instance with what you usuall get on your 3G smartphone) is due in large part because geeks in their majority have a strong ethical sense and know the value of openness. Snowden and Assange are geeks, but if you look at the HBGary leaks, you will see that developpers strongly opposed some policies. Whistleblowers about surveillance are almost always geeks involved in the infrastructure. Never legislators, managers, officiers, who know as well the extent of the surveillance.
I rely on debian to do that.
Debian provides binaries but their binaries are automatically compiled from sources. If you are unable to create a source package that compiles correctly, it cannot be part of debian.