I bet their accountants are killing themselves over how much inflation costs them each year alone.
That's not true at all.
Apple just put $1B of that into Didi Chuxing, the Chinese "Uber" equivalent.
They do plenty with the money. The problem is that, if they wanted to spend it in the U.S., for example, building a factory, the government would tax it again as U.S. income, even though it's already been taxed outside the U.S..
The government is literally paying them to make foreign investments instead of U.S. investments by attempting to engage in dual taxation.
As a nuclear physicist: Yes, that's true. But if you reprocessed the fuel rods instead of treating them as waste, they wouldn't be sitting in a pool being radioactive.
One problem with executing the wrong guy is that you've got a murderer around who's not only escaped conviction but scrutiny. Nobody's going to be looking for the real murderer, and even if some amateur finds the guy it's going to be awful embarrassing to prosecute him or her.
I seem to remember that after OJ's exoneration, no one was "looking for the real murderer", even though he had been found not guilty.
So the argument that the investigation would be pursued following a defendant being found guilty, and later exonerated, is even less likely.
That logic fails to allow for the presumption by the criminal that they will not be caught; and if caught, they may not be convicted; and if convicted, they may not receive the death penalty.
This is a different matter.
Now you are arguing about how effective a deterrent the penal system provides.
I would claim that the period of time between arrest and the carrying out of the sentence bears strongly on the effectiveness of a deterrent. The way to correct that would be to reduce the time between the crime and the remit to sentence. The more swiftly it happens, the more of a deterrent it poses for potential future offenders.
The penal system is not enacting it's penalties with an aim to rehabilitate e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer, it's enacting its penalties to stop the next Jeffrey Dahmer from eating his first victim.
This is a giant strawman. The vast majority of criminals are not Jeffrey Dahlmer and are not serving a life sentence.
Luckily, we are talking about the death penalty. None of the criminals on death row are serving a life sentence, either: they are serving a death sentence and awaiting execution.
This means that for MOST inmates the prison system is there to rehabilitate them to society.
No. It is there so that they can visibly be penalized for their crimes, to the benefit of society as a whole. They serve as negative examples.
We kind of don't give a rats ass about what does or does not happen after they have served their sentence. They can choose to avail themselves of what resources are available (generally, support up through a bachelor's degree), so that they have some chance of coping once they are released. Or they can choose not to do so.
If you look at actual data and charts on reconviction rates you'll note they go up as the length of the sentence goes up.
Correlation is not causation.
Perhaps people who are given longer penalties are more prone to commit crimes, thus deserving those longer penalties. In other words: it's the person who causes their own recidivism, and not the length of time they spend in prison on prior convictions.
While I'm perfectly fine with execution when there is absolute proof of guilt there are too many people on death row under falsified evidence or just plain shit law enforcement or legal work.
The purpose of execution, or even incarceration, or simple fines, is as a negative reinforcement for the behaviour for which the prisoner on whom the penalty is being enacted was found guilty.
Negative societal disincentives work, regardless of whether or not the person on whom the penalty is being enacted is actually guilty.
In a meta sense, it kind of doesn't even matter if they are guilty or not, since the purpose is neither rehabilitation nor vengeance; the purpose is social order.
Why is it then that the states are willing to break the law (and have) in order to get grey market prescription only drugs in order to use their cocktail rather than using nitrogen gas? Just abject stupidity?
Any form of execution, if it has not been used before, or has not been used in a long time, violates the "unusual" portion of the "cruel and unusual" clause of the Eighth amendment:
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted."
One of the primary mechanisms utilized by death penalty opponents in many states is to get a moratorium declared on death penalty enforcement for long enough that the death penalty itself will be deemed "unusual". Of course, this has not been a success strategy so far, but hop springs eternal among those who believe even serial killers are somehow redeemable.
There is a large difference between someone choosing to be put out of their misery and the state killing someone for some sense of vengeance.
I have to say:
Someone who commits a crime for which the penalty is death has chosen to be put out of their misery. It's suicide by state, and in many ways is no different than suicide by cop or suicide by jumping in front of a BART train.
You know there's a youtube video called how to kill a human being where the pro death penalty guy is against nitrogen asphyxiation because it literally isn't gruesome enough.
Exactly - to all appearances, the American penal system is not primarily about justice or rehabilitation, but revenge and control.
It's actually about giving the rest of society an incentive to not engage in the same crimes for which someone else was found guilty. Just like the police do not come until a crime is happening, or after the fact, a disincentive can not be given until someone is judged guilty by a jury of their peers.
The police are not there to save you from a crime, they are there to clean up after the fact. The penal system is not enacting it's penalties with an aim to rehabilitate e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer, it's enacting its penalties to stop the next Jeffrey Dahmer from eating his first victim.
Wont the prisms collect dust, and how do you clean an array of prisms?
ACME Prism Polish(tm).
The hard part is training the cartoon coyotes to apply it for you, rather than them converting your installation into a giant, solar, anti-roadrunner death beam.
In the US, perhaps. In most parts of the world, however, your economic gains from higher-efficiency panels are going to be negative, and this is going to stay that way for quite some time.
There's not a chance in hell that they are going to replace picturesque roofs in most of Europe, or sod roofs in the rural UK, with shiny, black, gridded, The Matrix-like solar panels.
Can you imagine putting angled roofs and black solar panels on all the buildings on Santorini? It would be fugly enough to drive away the residents, let alone the tourist trade.
While progress on efficiency is nice, the important criteria is watts/$, not watts/m^2. We have plenty of space on rooftops, over parking lots, and in deserts. But we need to continue to bring down the cost.
You obviously do not live in the Bay Area.
You can't lie the solar panels flat (they have to be angled), and if you have a flat roof, that means building up at least framing. Much of the roof space in the San Francisco Bay Area is flat.
More framing means more $/watt, so an improvement in watts/m^2 is an area squared improvement in cost.
In my personal area, mid-peninsula, I don't have enough usable roof area to hit break-even with the current panels SolarCity is trying to get people to buy for them so they can sell the property owners their electricity. A more efficient panel and two "power walls" would solve this break-even problem for me, but it turns out that once you are locked into a contract, they will not replace the panels, other than as a result of maintenance, for the next 20 years.
A more efficient panel would be a godsend, but until it happens, I'm either buying my electricity from both SolarCity and PG&E, or just from PG&E, and the up front cost amortized over 20 years of time value of money actually makes PG&E the cheaper option (for now).
Note that for rental properties, you might be talking 3 families in a 3 story building, and you have to fit the panels for everyone on the roof area that's pretty narrow, and pretty built upward already. I know of a large number of properties in the Inner Sunset and up towards the Outer Richmond, Sea Cliff, and Richmond districts that literally *can't* install solar panels without a zoning variance. It would make the building too tall to build the angle racks, or roof over the flat roofs with angled roofs, instead -- since the Solar providers won't guarantee against roof leaks, with an angled panel install, anyway.
No, solar is far from a solved problem, and increased energy density helps a lot more in dense areas than putting a lot of panels *everywhere* in a relatively limited area.
You will have this position until your favorite burger joint has to up the price because they can't get cheap burger flippers who're routinely doing 15 hour shifts for 8 hour pay because they're on meth.
If someone is on math, they're certainly not working 15 hours for 8 hours of pay.
Oh. Wait. You said "meth", not "math". My bad... as you were, math impaired burger flippers.
What kind of options does that buy you for the funeral arrangements, when a typical heavy truck hits you and kills you in traffic because the driver was stoned?
Since you were probably stoned as well (or you wouldn't be screwed up enough to be walking in traffic), it's probably not that big a deal. That said, states still operate pauper's graveyards all the time -- it's where most people who die in prison end up.
> Policework seems to be going down the same rathole that investigative journalism went down,
Police are just following where society has gone - online and into electronic communications. When two people in a night club conspire to assault the person sitting between them using WhatsApp, where do police turn to show that it was a premeditated crime and more serious than something random if phones cannot be broken into?
They get perp A to flip on perp B for some concession in sentencing. The police and prosecution have always done this with criminal conspiracies, and it is very rare that at least one person involved in the conspiracy does not flip.
In other words: good old fashioned police work.
>... where the penalty takes so freaking long to enact...
That's a completely separate problem but if relevant evidence that would speed things up is on a modern iPhone then it is no longer reachable.
In things like your first degree murder example, I mean enacting the death penalty quickly.
While some wrongly convicted (definitionally NOT innocent, as they were convicted) people may die as a result, the purpose of the penal system is not to serve some epistemological Platonic ideal of "justice", nor is it to enact "vengeance", as some would argue (thus allowing victims families to testify prior to sentencing), it's to act as a deterrent to rule breakers *other* than the person being held up as an example of what society does to people who break the rules.
Logically, their guilt kind of doesn't matter all that much. So rapidity serves the public good, more than accuracy.
Are you in favor of making it easier or harder for police to do the work that is required of them?
Not "easier at the expense of fundamental rights". The "harder" you refer to is not the same as "impossible", it simply means "requiring the expenditure of additional resources". Perhaps if they were to stop enforcing laws against consensual crime, such as drug abuse, or sodomy, they would have more resources to go after child pornographers.
Sadly, no one is "thinking of the children", are they?
> You haven't prevented the social harm by breaking into Guido The Child Perv's iPhone.
But you may find a list of contacts that Guido has exchanged it with.
Given my initial premise that Guido (and most like him) represent leaf nodes: you will not find that information.
What actionable intelligence was obtained from the San Bernardino iPhone? That's what I thought.
Maybe I'll put it like this: how do you envisage police obtaining evidence when a phone such as the iPhone (with WhatsApp) is used for all communication around planning a crime and executing it?
By demonstrating probable cause that the iPhone contains the evidence they seek.
And then getting a warrant and serving it on Apple to obtain access to the iPhone's contents from the iCloud backup, after not being fucking morons and causing the iCloud password to be changed.
> We want the police to arrest the child pornographers at the point of the creation of the pornography, prior to its distribution, and prior to the further abuse of the children in question. If they can't do that, then what good are they to anyone?
If they take that image with an iPhone then they can't ever obtain it prior to distribution.
Which is to say that you are arguing that there is no need for police.
Incorrect. They should battering-RAM down the door while the pornographer is there, with the naked child.
That's enough to throw them in prison for a very, very long time. If you are in a reasonable jurisdiction, they will throw them in prison for life, or until the other inmates find out what they are in for, if they happen to be in general population. Whichever comes first.
I've a 24/7 recording camera in my home which does both audio & video... and I turn it off from time to time when I'm going to have a conversation which I want to reduce the possibility of someone ever being able to overhear.
I know.
The Chinese company that sells me access to the web site that lets me remotely monitor your (or anyone else's) camera and microphone for $9.95 a month pops up a dialog when you do that, and I have to click "Reenable" instead of "Ignore" on the little dialog box.
Luckily, I've written an Automator script to click the button for me, in case I'm away from home when you go into that mode, since I still want to record everything you say or do "just in case".
Before WhatsApp and the iPhone, there weren't any real obstacles. Given time and equipment, any physical safe can be opened.
It *can* be, but it won't be. John DOE, Petitioner v. UNITED STATES. 487 U.S. 201 (108 S.Ct. 2341, 101 L.Ed.2d 184).
"A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating. Fingerprints, blood samples, voice exemplars, handwriting specimens, or other items of physical evidence may be extracted from a defendant against his will. But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe —- by word or deed."
The police did not subsequently obtain a warrant to break open the safe, because they could not produce probable cause that the safe contained the bank records which the police were seeking.
So no: there is no difference between encryption and a combination lock.
What's interesting, however, is that there is, likewise, no difference between a lockbox key and a fingerprint to unlock a phone. So if you are stupid enough to use a fingerprint lock, they can compel you to put your finger on the sensor.
The only difference here is that an iPhone is treated differently than a safe, because the iPhone isn't (yet) as secure as a safe, and the iPhone isn't (yet) treated as a container for data, rather than personal property. Obviously, the first time someone is smart enough to raise that precedent in an evidentiary hearing and get an iPhone hack in as an illegal search, things will go to hell for the police, and then for the FBI.
So for right now, I think they will use it only where they've used it so far: where the perp doesn't own the device, and the actual owner gives permission.
Of course, this means that, for most of the U.S., which buys their iPhone over time as part of agreeing to a service contract, until they go off contract, it's actually the telephone company which owns the iPhone, not the person in whose possession it happens to currently reside.
That should make a nice court case, as well: when the police go to the telephone company and obtain permission. Expect if e.g. AT&T actually grants permission, that the week following, there's going to be a LOT of new T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint customers.
I don't think that WhatsApp really understands what this means.
I think they do. I think they have a pretty damned good idea, in fact, having talked to a number of executive officers of the company personally about the issue.
Is this really what we want - for evidence of crimes to be unobtainable?
No.
In the "think of the children" argument you are making, this is what we want:
We want the police to arrest the child pornographers at the point of the creation of the pornography, prior to its distribution, and prior to the further abuse of the children in question. If they can't do that, then what good are they to anyone?
Great, you break into an iPhone, and find someone has a picture on it that was illegally created, and is illegal to posses. Big deal. For every copy you find, there are dozens or hundreds still out there. You haven't prevented the social harm by breaking into Guido The Child Perv's iPhone. You haven't even ameliorated it a bit, if Guido is a "leaf node" (i.e. he doesn't distribute the material himself).
Marching in after a crime has been committed and figuratively beating the crap out of the perpetrator, while the victim is still lying in a pool of blood is not a useful operation. It clearly does not prevent future victims, particularly for things like murder, where the penalty takes so freaking long to enact that someone can start by getting their GED and have multiple PhDs before they ever
"...should be taken with a grain of salt..."...Unless you have one of the 17 genes linked with high blood pressure, in which case you should use a salt substitute, like potassium chloride, instead.
There was no way McClatchy was going to breach the contract.
It's not breach of contract unless there was already an exchange of consideration. Without that, there was no contract.
McClatchy may have indeed paid the company in India money: they probably did, in fact; but did the company in India perform any IT tasks on behalf of McClatchy? Unlikely in the extreme, if their employees had not even been trained as of yet.
IT departments often insert themselves in ways which make for "process for the sake of process".
A perfect example of this is the IT department which tells employees which Apps the can or can not install on their iPhones and iPads.
This is asinine, since what they are effectively claiming is that they are better at curating Apps than Apple, Inc..
Are they? No. This is an absurd proposition. If your IT people could really do a better job on App curation than Apple, then your entire company would have been bought by Google, which is pretty piss-poor at App curation, and the entire company, other than the IT department, thrown away, and the IT department installed as Google's new Android App curation team.
And that didn't happen, did it? So your IT people are sticking their noses into something that the vendor of the device has already accomplished better than they could themselves accomplish, just so that they can weild a bit of petty power over the other people who work for the company.
Or maybe those cutting-edge skills are just buzz-words for things already being done or buzz-words for things that are ill advised.
Either way, the GP's point appears to be that they failed to apply them, and that's why the employees were let go. So it kind of doesn't matter if your boss tells you to do a smart thing or a stupid thing: not obeying the boss by doing the thing means getting fired.
"IT employees thought they were part of the solution to McClatchy's tech direction, not the problem."
Yeah.
It's pretty common for the people who are the problem to think that they are the solution, and then not be the solution.
There's even a term coined for people who insert themselves into a process, but have no real utility to the process itself, other than to slow it down. It's "AI", and no that doesn't mean what you think it means: it stands for "Artificial Importance". People who insert themselves into processes in order to make themselves important are worse than useless.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet their accountants are killing themselves over how much inflation costs them each year alone.
That's not true at all.
Apple just put $1B of that into Didi Chuxing, the Chinese "Uber" equivalent.
They do plenty with the money. The problem is that, if they wanted to spend it in the U.S., for example, building a factory, the government would tax it again as U.S. income, even though it's already been taxed outside the U.S..
The government is literally paying them to make foreign investments instead of U.S. investments by attempting to engage in dual taxation.
As a nuclear physicist: Yes, that's true. But if you reprocessed the fuel rods instead of treating them as waste, they wouldn't be sitting in a pool being radioactive.
One problem with executing the wrong guy is that you've got a murderer around who's not only escaped conviction but scrutiny. Nobody's going to be looking for the real murderer, and even if some amateur finds the guy it's going to be awful embarrassing to prosecute him or her.
I seem to remember that after OJ's exoneration, no one was "looking for the real murderer", even though he had been found not guilty.
So the argument that the investigation would be pursued following a defendant being found guilty, and later exonerated, is even less likely.
That logic fails to allow for the presumption by the criminal that they will not be caught; and if caught, they may not be convicted; and if convicted, they may not receive the death penalty.
This is a different matter.
Now you are arguing about how effective a deterrent the penal system provides.
I would claim that the period of time between arrest and the carrying out of the sentence bears strongly on the effectiveness of a deterrent. The way to correct that would be to reduce the time between the crime and the remit to sentence. The more swiftly it happens, the more of a deterrent it poses for potential future offenders.
This is a giant strawman. The vast majority of criminals are not Jeffrey Dahlmer and are not serving a life sentence.
Luckily, we are talking about the death penalty. None of the criminals on death row are serving a life sentence, either: they are serving a death sentence and awaiting execution.
This means that for MOST inmates the prison system is there to rehabilitate them to society.
No. It is there so that they can visibly be penalized for their crimes, to the benefit of society as a whole. They serve as negative examples.
We kind of don't give a rats ass about what does or does not happen after they have served their sentence. They can choose to avail themselves of what resources are available (generally, support up through a bachelor's degree), so that they have some chance of coping once they are released. Or they can choose not to do so.
If you look at actual data and charts on reconviction rates you'll note they go up as the length of the sentence goes up.
Correlation is not causation.
Perhaps people who are given longer penalties are more prone to commit crimes, thus deserving those longer penalties. In other words: it's the person who causes their own recidivism, and not the length of time they spend in prison on prior convictions.
The numbers you supplied do not account for that.
While I'm perfectly fine with execution when there is absolute proof of guilt there are too many people on death row under falsified evidence or just plain shit law enforcement or legal work.
The purpose of execution, or even incarceration, or simple fines, is as a negative reinforcement for the behaviour for which the prisoner on whom the penalty is being enacted was found guilty.
Negative societal disincentives work, regardless of whether or not the person on whom the penalty is being enacted is actually guilty.
In a meta sense, it kind of doesn't even matter if they are guilty or not, since the purpose is neither rehabilitation nor vengeance; the purpose is social order.
Why is it then that the states are willing to break the law (and have) in order to get grey market prescription only drugs in order to use their cocktail rather than using nitrogen gas? Just abject stupidity?
Any form of execution, if it has not been used before, or has not been used in a long time, violates the "unusual" portion of the "cruel and unusual" clause of the Eighth amendment:
"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted."
One of the primary mechanisms utilized by death penalty opponents in many states is to get a moratorium declared on death penalty enforcement for long enough that the death penalty itself will be deemed "unusual". Of course, this has not been a success strategy so far, but hop springs eternal among those who believe even serial killers are somehow redeemable.
There is a large difference between someone choosing to be put out of their misery and the state killing someone for some sense of vengeance.
I have to say:
Someone who commits a crime for which the penalty is death has chosen to be put out of their misery. It's suicide by state, and in many ways is no different than suicide by cop or suicide by jumping in front of a BART train.
You know there's a youtube video called how to kill a human being where the pro death penalty guy is against nitrogen asphyxiation because it literally isn't gruesome enough.
Exactly - to all appearances, the American penal system is not primarily about justice or rehabilitation, but revenge and control.
It's actually about giving the rest of society an incentive to not engage in the same crimes for which someone else was found guilty. Just like the police do not come until a crime is happening, or after the fact, a disincentive can not be given until someone is judged guilty by a jury of their peers.
The police are not there to save you from a crime, they are there to clean up after the fact. The penal system is not enacting it's penalties with an aim to rehabilitate e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer, it's enacting its penalties to stop the next Jeffrey Dahmer from eating his first victim.
Wont the prisms collect dust, and how do you clean an array of prisms?
ACME Prism Polish(tm).
The hard part is training the cartoon coyotes to apply it for you, rather than them converting your installation into a giant, solar, anti-roadrunner death beam.
In the US, perhaps. In most parts of the world, however, your economic gains from higher-efficiency panels are going to be negative, and this is going to stay that way for quite some time.
There's not a chance in hell that they are going to replace picturesque roofs in most of Europe, or sod roofs in the rural UK, with shiny, black, gridded, The Matrix-like solar panels.
Can you imagine putting angled roofs and black solar panels on all the buildings on Santorini? It would be fugly enough to drive away the residents, let alone the tourist trade.
While progress on efficiency is nice, the important criteria is watts/$, not watts/m^2. We have plenty of space on rooftops, over parking lots, and in deserts. But we need to continue to bring down the cost.
You obviously do not live in the Bay Area.
You can't lie the solar panels flat (they have to be angled), and if you have a flat roof, that means building up at least framing. Much of the roof space in the San Francisco Bay Area is flat.
More framing means more $/watt, so an improvement in watts/m^2 is an area squared improvement in cost.
In my personal area, mid-peninsula, I don't have enough usable roof area to hit break-even with the current panels SolarCity is trying to get people to buy for them so they can sell the property owners their electricity. A more efficient panel and two "power walls" would solve this break-even problem for me, but it turns out that once you are locked into a contract, they will not replace the panels, other than as a result of maintenance, for the next 20 years.
A more efficient panel would be a godsend, but until it happens, I'm either buying my electricity from both SolarCity and PG&E, or just from PG&E, and the up front cost amortized over 20 years of time value of money actually makes PG&E the cheaper option (for now).
Note that for rental properties, you might be talking 3 families in a 3 story building, and you have to fit the panels for everyone on the roof area that's pretty narrow, and pretty built upward already. I know of a large number of properties in the Inner Sunset and up towards the Outer Richmond, Sea Cliff, and Richmond districts that literally *can't* install solar panels without a zoning variance. It would make the building too tall to build the angle racks, or roof over the flat roofs with angled roofs, instead -- since the Solar providers won't guarantee against roof leaks, with an angled panel install, anyway.
No, solar is far from a solved problem, and increased energy density helps a lot more in dense areas than putting a lot of panels *everywhere* in a relatively limited area.
Riddle me this... do you want your heart surgeon on mind effecting drugs?
If the mind effecting drugs are Nootrpics, like Oxcetam, Piracetam, Hydergine, L-theanine, Aniracetam, and so on?
Sure!
What kind of moron *wouldn't* want their heart surgeon to have a 20 point boost in their IQ before opening up their chest cavity?
You will have this position until your favorite burger joint has to up the price because they can't get cheap burger flippers who're routinely doing 15 hour shifts for 8 hour pay because they're on meth.
If someone is on math, they're certainly not working 15 hours for 8 hours of pay.
Oh. Wait. You said "meth", not "math". My bad... as you were, math impaired burger flippers.
What kind of options does that buy you for the funeral arrangements, when a typical heavy truck hits you and kills you in traffic because the driver was stoned?
Since you were probably stoned as well (or you wouldn't be screwed up enough to be walking in traffic), it's probably not that big a deal. That said, states still operate pauper's graveyards all the time -- it's where most people who die in prison end up.
Very Very sad I cannot mod this up.
> Policework seems to be going down the same rathole that investigative journalism went down,
Police are just following where society has gone - online and into electronic communications. When two people in a night club conspire to assault the person sitting between them using WhatsApp, where do police turn to show that it was a premeditated crime and more serious than something random if phones cannot be broken into?
They get perp A to flip on perp B for some concession in sentencing. The police and prosecution have always done this with criminal conspiracies, and it is very rare that at least one person involved in the conspiracy does not flip.
In other words: good old fashioned police work.
> ... where the penalty takes so freaking long to enact ...
That's a completely separate problem but if relevant evidence that would speed things up is on a modern iPhone then it is no longer reachable.
In things like your first degree murder example, I mean enacting the death penalty quickly.
While some wrongly convicted (definitionally NOT innocent, as they were convicted) people may die as a result, the purpose of the penal system is not to serve some epistemological Platonic ideal of "justice", nor is it to enact "vengeance", as some would argue (thus allowing victims families to testify prior to sentencing), it's to act as a deterrent to rule breakers *other* than the person being held up as an example of what society does to people who break the rules.
Logically, their guilt kind of doesn't matter all that much. So rapidity serves the public good, more than accuracy.
Are you in favor of making it easier or harder for police to do the work that is required of them?
Not "easier at the expense of fundamental rights". The "harder" you refer to is not the same as "impossible", it simply means "requiring the expenditure of additional resources". Perhaps if they were to stop enforcing laws against consensual crime, such as drug abuse, or sodomy, they would have more resources to go after child pornographers.
Sadly, no one is "thinking of the children", are they?
> You haven't prevented the social harm by breaking into Guido The Child Perv's iPhone.
But you may find a list of contacts that Guido has exchanged it with.
Given my initial premise that Guido (and most like him) represent leaf nodes: you will not find that information.
What actionable intelligence was obtained from the San Bernardino iPhone? That's what I thought.
Maybe I'll put it like this: how do you envisage police obtaining evidence when a phone such as the iPhone (with WhatsApp) is used for all communication around planning a crime and executing it?
By demonstrating probable cause that the iPhone contains the evidence they seek.
And then getting a warrant and serving it on Apple to obtain access to the iPhone's contents from the iCloud backup, after not being fucking morons and causing the iCloud password to be changed.
> We want the police to arrest the child pornographers at the point of the creation of the pornography, prior to its distribution, and prior to the further abuse of the children in question. If they can't do that, then what good are they to anyone?
If they take that image with an iPhone then they can't ever obtain it prior to distribution.
Which is to say that you are arguing that there is no need for police.
Incorrect. They should battering-RAM down the door while the pornographer is there, with the naked child.
That's enough to throw them in prison for a very, very long time. If you are in a reasonable jurisdiction, they will throw them in prison for life, or until the other inmates find out what they are in for, if they happen to be in general population. Whichever comes first.
I've a 24/7 recording camera in my home which does both audio & video... and I turn it off from time to time when I'm going to have a conversation which I want to reduce the possibility of someone ever being able to overhear.
I know.
The Chinese company that sells me access to the web site that lets me remotely monitor your (or anyone else's) camera and microphone for $9.95 a month pops up a dialog when you do that, and I have to click "Reenable" instead of "Ignore" on the little dialog box.
Luckily, I've written an Automator script to click the button for me, in case I'm away from home when you go into that mode, since I still want to record everything you say or do "just in case".
Before WhatsApp and the iPhone, there weren't any real obstacles. Given time and equipment, any physical safe can be opened.
It *can* be, but it won't be. John DOE, Petitioner v. UNITED STATES. 487 U.S. 201 (108 S.Ct. 2341, 101 L.Ed.2d 184).
"A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating. Fingerprints, blood samples, voice exemplars, handwriting specimens, or other items of physical evidence may be extracted from a defendant against his will. But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe —- by word or deed."
The police did not subsequently obtain a warrant to break open the safe, because they could not produce probable cause that the safe contained the bank records which the police were seeking.
So no: there is no difference between encryption and a combination lock.
What's interesting, however, is that there is, likewise, no difference between a lockbox key and a fingerprint to unlock a phone. So if you are stupid enough to use a fingerprint lock, they can compel you to put your finger on the sensor.
The only difference here is that an iPhone is treated differently than a safe, because the iPhone isn't (yet) as secure as a safe, and the iPhone isn't (yet) treated as a container for data, rather than personal property. Obviously, the first time someone is smart enough to raise that precedent in an evidentiary hearing and get an iPhone hack in as an illegal search, things will go to hell for the police, and then for the FBI.
So for right now, I think they will use it only where they've used it so far: where the perp doesn't own the device, and the actual owner gives permission.
Of course, this means that, for most of the U.S., which buys their iPhone over time as part of agreeing to a service contract, until they go off contract, it's actually the telephone company which owns the iPhone, not the person in whose possession it happens to currently reside.
That should make a nice court case, as well: when the police go to the telephone company and obtain permission. Expect if e.g. AT&T actually grants permission, that the week following, there's going to be a LOT of new T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint customers.
I don't think that WhatsApp really understands what this means.
I think they do. I think they have a pretty damned good idea, in fact, having talked to a number of executive officers of the company personally about the issue.
Is this really what we want - for evidence of crimes to be unobtainable?
No.
In the "think of the children" argument you are making, this is what we want:
We want the police to arrest the child pornographers at the point of the creation of the pornography, prior to its distribution, and prior to the further abuse of the children in question. If they can't do that, then what good are they to anyone?
Great, you break into an iPhone, and find someone has a picture on it that was illegally created, and is illegal to posses. Big deal. For every copy you find, there are dozens or hundreds still out there. You haven't prevented the social harm by breaking into Guido The Child Perv's iPhone. You haven't even ameliorated it a bit, if Guido is a "leaf node" (i.e. he doesn't distribute the material himself).
Marching in after a crime has been committed and figuratively beating the crap out of the perpetrator, while the victim is still lying in a pool of blood is not a useful operation. It clearly does not prevent future victims, particularly for things like murder, where the penalty takes so freaking long to enact that someone can start by getting their GED and have multiple PhDs before they ever
"...should be taken with a grain of salt..." ...Unless you have one of the 17 genes linked with high blood pressure, in which case you should use a salt substitute, like potassium chloride, instead.
There was no way McClatchy was going to breach the contract.
It's not breach of contract unless there was already an exchange of consideration. Without that, there was no contract.
McClatchy may have indeed paid the company in India money: they probably did, in fact; but did the company in India perform any IT tasks on behalf of McClatchy? Unlikely in the extreme, if their employees had not even been trained as of yet.
IT departments often insert themselves in ways which make for "process for the sake of process".
A perfect example of this is the IT department which tells employees which Apps the can or can not install on their iPhones and iPads.
This is asinine, since what they are effectively claiming is that they are better at curating Apps than Apple, Inc..
Are they? No. This is an absurd proposition. If your IT people could really do a better job on App curation than Apple, then your entire company would have been bought by Google, which is pretty piss-poor at App curation, and the entire company, other than the IT department, thrown away, and the IT department installed as Google's new Android App curation team.
And that didn't happen, did it? So your IT people are sticking their noses into something that the vendor of the device has already accomplished better than they could themselves accomplish, just so that they can weild a bit of petty power over the other people who work for the company.
It makes no sense to /pay/ them to do this.
Or maybe those cutting-edge skills are just buzz-words for things already being done or buzz-words for things that are ill advised.
Either way, the GP's point appears to be that they failed to apply them, and that's why the employees were let go. So it kind of doesn't matter if your boss tells you to do a smart thing or a stupid thing: not obeying the boss by doing the thing means getting fired.
"IT employees thought they were part of the solution to McClatchy's tech direction, not the problem."
Yeah.
It's pretty common for the people who are the problem to think that they are the solution, and then not be the solution.
There's even a term coined for people who insert themselves into a process, but have no real utility to the process itself, other than to slow it down. It's "AI", and no that doesn't mean what you think it means: it stands for "Artificial Importance". People who insert themselves into processes in order to make themselves important are worse than useless.