That was my first thought too. There is an obvious privacy, implication. Maybe in some really contorted situation you could induce someone to do something dangerous like convince a diabetic they have done a whole ton of walking this morning and therefore should eat more sugar than normal and similar attacks.
I think the big issue is the potential to use this as a vector to introduce malware to the phone or PC the owner interfaces the device with. Not sure how practical that is.
Facebook is entitled to do whatever they want. I understand that. There is an issue of State here, the Turkish State, requiring Facebook to filter and or creating at least the implied thread they will be blocked if they do not filter.
I think FB ought to stand up for our idea of civil society where the state is not allowed to censor. If Facebook though it was best for the business to censor images of the profit, they would do it everywhere, because doing so offends Muslims everywhere; and I'd be fine with it.
As a fellow citizen I'd rather see FB say hey fuck you Turkey, we are US based website your rules don't apply to us; either block us or don't.
Facebook could do something pincipled though. They could setup all kinds of proxies make encryption easy. Provide tools for evading filters etc. All things that would be perfectly legal here. They could flaunt the law in Turkey and just keep their people out of Turkey. Mark could consider his name on their most wanted heretics list or whatever to be a badge of honer.
Naturally if FB was effective and underground scene in some of these freedom hating nations they would not be able to make much add revenue from business there though.
It really is a pretty black and white issue, you think censorship is okay or your think its never okay. Only the ideas some would seek to censor are the ones that ever needed protection in the first place.
The freedom to offend must be held absolutely sacrosanct.
I don't understand how the censors don't seem to get that. Freedom of speech was established specifically so the mechanisms of state could not be used to suppress dissent and ideas. Nobody has ever need a protected right to express opinions (or facts) which are popular, non controversial, and inoffensive. When was the last time these people heard of someone being tortured to death for the principled commit to the idea "Water is wet."? Never.
Free speech is all about the right to offend and dissent. If some topics are taboo than you haven't got any freedom at all. Because for the most part anything worth saying is going to offend someone somewhere somehow. Its really an all or nothing deal.
All the issues of free expression and if Facebook is or is not advancing the human condition by enabling Turks to communicate, vs likely being banned by refusing to filter on principle of free expression; does this even help.
I am not an expert on Islamic culture but I thought the prohibition was of depicting the "profit". Wont FB basically have to just ban the name Mohammad, which would offend lots of people. Otherwise what stops someone from posting a steaming cow pie, and tagging it "Mohammad the profit"? Is that not depicting the "profit" as a heap of shit? Is it an less offensive anyway?
If they can pay 5 mil a year and it costs 10 mil to fix the issues, then I'll take the fine every time.
I don't even the likes of Verizon would act that way. I know short term profits are everything but so are anticipated future earnings, if the cost of fixing the problem was only equal to a few years of fines, they'd fix that rather than putting the anticipated futures fines in their SEC filings.
Now if it was going to be like 10 years or more before the fines exceeded the cost to fix it, than they might just decided to pay the fines as if they are a just another tax.
I think we should drop license plate requirements. I mean seriously driving around with a big personal identifier on my vehicle puts the lives of me and my family at risk. It makes it trivial for stalkers to track me. They can tell what place of business I am at just by observing my car is in the lot.
Some information is public. It just is the cops are all to happy to argue you have not fourth amendment protection against them setting up cameras all over town with OCR to recognize plates and compiling a big database that essentially knows where you are at all times. That's no problem I mean anyone can see your vehicle out in public view right and anyone could compile such information? sure..
As soon as the public does something remotely similar, but decidedly less intrusive in that it does not track specific cops. OMG its a problem won't somebody please think of these brave officers we are putting at risk!
Fuck that! If I have to be watched all the time so do they!
Regulation IS the problem. Had we done the principled thing and let AIG and Goldman burn when the time came it would have taken lots of big finance with it. There would have been plenty of churn as far as just who the 1% are. I would even guess some of them would have been left with less than nothing.
Oh but they would still have all kinds of physical property and hard assets. Yes but assets sometimes have a funny way of turning into liabilities when you don't have the case flow to manage them properly. Just imagine if you can't pay your home owners policy on your Mansion you can still get sued when someone breaks their leg while trespassing.
These guys are where they are entirely because of governments and regulation. Income inequality is greater than what existed in the gilded age! These levels of inequality are made possible by regulation and free market impediments, not for lack of them.
The biggest problem with home automation is 'life happens', eventually you want to put things into a state that was never originally anticipated.
Maybe the computer thinks, windows are open = turn off HVAC, or switch to fan only etc. Trouble is grandma stopped by and burned her Christmas cookies, smells terrible in the house, you want the windows open but you want to also leave the heat on, so you don't freeze.
Now you have to go override some "smart" system some where. It all ends up being just as much work as turning things on and off by hand was in the first place.
No the entire argument is silly. I could just as easily suggest drug test makes sense in fast food because who knows, someone with a drug addled mind might thing its a good idea to wipe the grill down with drain cleaner before cooking my burger.
No business have the right to do whatever they like and require whatever they want as conditions of employment, but they should not be encouraged to reach into the private lives of employees. Drug testing is intrusive, and costly. Requiring it should be a quick way to make sure your company isn't on any of those 'best places to work lists'
What companies should do is simply check their employees arrive for work in state they can do it effectively and safely in. At your fast food restaurant if the Assistant Manager can't be arsed to walk around and make sure workers don't appear to be to 'high' to do their jobs properly you got bigger problems than anything a drug test is going to uncover.
Someplace like Disney has tonnes of pre-open check lists and radio check-ins etc. If lower management can't spot operator that shows up to work drugged out than once again drug tests are not the answer. I have seen guys come it work with fevers before from flu and back fork lifts into other employees etc. Drug tests don't screen for flu. There is no substitute for a quick 'hello' and occasional walk arounds for employees who operate hazardous equipment or work in conditions that may be dangerous to them or others. Does matter if its a roller coaster or fryer filled with scalding oil! It also does not matter if said employee was 'tripping balls' 7 hours ago, it matters they are sober while on the job!
Yea, but know all the folks actually majoring in Crime, just copy their answers off the Criminology major in the front of the room who is just taking class as an elective. The Crime students never do the reading...
This is why our system is so messed up. This why the lobbyists and influence vendors have power. This why our laws are written such that not even the people who enact them really know what they mean.
The reason is voters like you, are willing to let them off the hook. When these guys sign their name to it they need to be accountable for it FULL STOP. You should not let them make excuses like oh well it was must pass....
No all those democrats who voted for the ACA better be willing to stand up and say proudly "I thought all the giveaways, deceptions, curtailment of individual freedoms, in the ACA were worth it to get something done." If they can't say that than they are not fit to represent you.
Same with this everyone who voted for this need to either agree with statements on climate, or admit there principle position on scientific integrity is subject to getting even relatively unimportant things done like Keystone XL.
We should base policy on what the majority of 'the people' (read voters without regard for what internationally other people want) wish to do, after they have been made aware of the risk a large number of scientists believe to exist.
That is a valid point. There is a lot Linux in the embedded and 'quasi-embedded' space that does never get updated.
That is a little different than what we normally think of as application servers that IT would be responsible for migrating. In the 'quasi-embedded' like the climate system you describe where there is basically a PC attached to some machinery you are correct. The opsticle to upgrading these things has little to do with Linux or Windows though, and everything to do with the machinery vendors unwillingness to QA or support anything other than their original configurations. You see the same situation happen with Windows boxen all the time as well just walk around any hospital or machine shop floor and you will see all sorts of DOS/Win9x/XP - pre SP2 about. Its not Microsoft's fault really nor any Linux distro maintainers where this happens.
As to the embedded space, routers, switches, headless controllers, PLCs. The amount of out data Linux out there with potentially major flaws is terrifying.
Why are you surprised the entire 'Affordable' care is really just a pile of giveaways to certain monied interests.
I mean come on the left the private insurance industry in place, while all but forcing the public to buy their product. The left them with the ability to set rates. The only real encouragement for them not gouge, is fear of political back lash AND essentially a government grantee that if they do somehow lose money they will be make whole.
There essentially no controls on the medical tort industry in it. Nothing was done manage increasing drug costs The medial device tax, the like one thing that industry might not like, is suspended. Piles of money were spent hiring the incompetent to build the exchange.
The entire thing is theft all the way up and down.
Fair enough, but there are some really key differences between the Linux world and that of Windows and even Unix.
You distribution tends to package like 90+ % of the software on the system. The left over 10% is whatever in house app the server is running or 3rd party app you bought. All the libraries it uses, and support software that it uses database engines, etc typically are in the distribution. So the integration details library versions supported version issues are all taken care of for you.
On Windows this absolutely not the case. Things like databases, libraries for document rendering, and just about anything else you can think of is maintained outside the OS distribution. So Windows is where you upgrade and discover UAC totally breaks the version of ${SOFTWARE PACKGE} you have installed or changes to winHTTP cause all the web service calls to fail etc. Even if they mostly are other first party applications like SQL Server or Office. Its also true that its harder to isolate things. If you install something to/opt or/usr/local on a Linux box and those are separate partitions you can have reasonable confidence that blowing away / won't and reloading it from distribution media will leave you with a working app where you left it. Good luck with that on Windows unless you designed the package yourself and avoided the registry and tens of other possible pitfalls.
So again speaking in the general case its easier to go from RHEL 6.x to RHEL 7.x with an in place upgrade, as is true for most other Linux distros; however you do it, let package manager figurout distupdage or re-install a fresh/.
In most of my travels I have not seen 10+ year old Linux versions in production unless its at the same kind of shop that also does not care to patch or be on a supported version of Windows. Even in shops that are good about patch management get their WSUS updates applied etc ( I want to be fair to MS here these rarely if ever break anything) there is still lots of legitimate fear around upgrading an application server between major Windows versions. So in lots of cases Windows boxes tend to stay on whatever release for either the life of the hardware or the life of the app whichever is shorter. Linux boxes tend to be upgraded more frequently.
Now that would be interesting. "You drove for a total of 6 hours and 51 minuets last month and major metro area, using your own vehicle presently valued at $X" You bill based on the risk you exposed us to is $Y.
With some quiet legislative changes to insurable interest [wikipedia.org] regulations, the likes of Goldman Sachs will soon be shorting your grandfather's life
Don't hold your breath there have been lots of folks who have tried this business. My ${relative} was a 30 year live insurance industry veteran. ${gender pronoun} was hired by a start-up as a expert. They had a full cabal of attorneys and folks to put up the capital on the line. The goal was to essentially establish an exchange or brokerage for other peoples life policies.
So for example a company takes out a life insurance policy on their CEO. CEO some years later. What generally happens today is the policy is allowed to lapse and the life insurer gets all the profit or the company is forced to continue servicing the policy for an indefinite period so they can eventually collect the benefit or exchange the policy for some cash value in some cases.
Their idea was you could sell the policy, the liability for paying the premium and the right to be the beneficiary. This way the policy could be sold for its net present value, rather than simply surrendered for its usually lower cash value or allowed to lapse.
Needless to say many trips to Washington were made and long SEC conversations were held and after several years they were forced to give the whole thing up. Insurable interest regulations were only a part of the problem. There are lots legal hurdles around 'who' is allowed to sell an insurance policy. The SEC was less than excited about a part other than the originator or a borker representing them doing it.
Don't worry about your precious tax dollars. I am sure they mostly paid for these things with civilly forfeited assets.
How lucky we are to live in a society where the police can just take money and property from people they don't like on some thin pretext of drug involvement. The best part is since there is expensive overhead associated with review or due process 100% of the revenue can be directly reinvesting in to further civil rights abuses ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ additional policing even more greatly reducing tax monies we would other wise have to commit to oppression ^H^H^H^H^H^H law enforcement.
The problem is people, that is why we set a government up in the first place; primarily to protect ourselves from each other.
So yes government is the problem. It never can be anything better than a necessary evil. It should be restricted, strangled, starved, and otherwise impeded to the point it can only barely achieve its goal of protecting people from each other, with minimal efficacy. To allow it to get any bigger or more capable than that as we have done not only invites abuse but assures it.
"context" don't make me laugh. There is no application of context to modern law. All sides take advantage. The words are stretched and the intents are ignored until the law can practically mean anything the AG wants it to mean that day. "VPN" already has plenty of interpretations in the tech world once the legal world gets hold of it, it is certain to be interpreted as just about anything that isn't a direct essentially the most direct path between hosts available using a plaintext protocol.
If you think otherwise you are crazy, or haven't been paying attention.
Where it all breaks down though is you need to get a public key from a trusted source.
For instance with SSL it works. A)You ask for example.com and get 244.244.244.244 as the DNS result.
B)244.244.244.244 responds and presents a certificate (public key) for example.com
C)You check the certificate for example.com is legit by verification of a signature done with a 3rd party private key and check that with a public key you already have (root CA list). You can now trust 244.244.244.244's claim to be example.com and use that public key to decipher message sent to you with its private key. (which you will use to exchange a symmetric key, but that's getting off topic).
The problem with your example above with e-mail is that Bob has no way to authenticate the original message from Alice. He can't know that the public key he has been sent really from Alice and not his wife spoofing Alice's address because she suspects Alice is a mistress. Bob is how we say 'screwed'.
The only way it can work is if someone counter signs for Alice that Bob already trusts. With SSL and the 3rd party CA system its do able because Companies only have so many Web servers they are willing to pay Verisign or GeoTrust to essentially act as a notary. They won't do this for every employee that wants to send mail, the general public can't be arsed to do it either. So the CA model does not work.
Hence we have the web of trust model. This depends on your belief that most people in that web are responsible about who they 'trust' as authentic sources of keys. It assumes that most senders properly guard their private keys, or even understand they need to guard them and against what. There is zero evidence to suggest the general public has this understanding or capability.
Then there is the problem of web mail. If everyone is just going to hand Google (I am picking on them because of the popularity of GMail) their private keys we are ONE breach away from the entire system crashing down. If you implement some kind of client side encryption with javascript we ware still ONE breach away, someone gets in and replaces the javascript with a malicious one, your client trusts it because well it came from Google's server. It also makes webmail inherently unportable because you have to bring your key with you and what enter it into every untrusted systems all the time?
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first thought too. There is an obvious privacy, implication. Maybe in some really contorted situation you could induce someone to do something dangerous like convince a diabetic they have done a whole ton of walking this morning and therefore should eat more sugar than normal and similar attacks.
I think the big issue is the potential to use this as a vector to introduce malware to the phone or PC the owner interfaces the device with. Not sure how practical that is.
Facebook is entitled to do whatever they want. I understand that. There is an issue of State here, the Turkish State, requiring Facebook to filter and or creating at least the implied thread they will be blocked if they do not filter.
I think FB ought to stand up for our idea of civil society where the state is not allowed to censor. If Facebook though it was best for the business to censor images of the profit, they would do it everywhere, because doing so offends Muslims everywhere; and I'd be fine with it.
As a fellow citizen I'd rather see FB say hey fuck you Turkey, we are US based website your rules don't apply to us; either block us or don't.
Facebook could do something pincipled though. They could setup all kinds of proxies make encryption easy. Provide tools for evading filters etc. All things that would be perfectly legal here. They could flaunt the law in Turkey and just keep their people out of Turkey. Mark could consider his name on their most wanted heretics list or whatever to be a badge of honer.
Naturally if FB was effective and underground scene in some of these freedom hating nations they would not be able to make much add revenue from business there though.
It really is a pretty black and white issue, you think censorship is okay or your think its never okay. Only the ideas some would seek to censor are the ones that ever needed protection in the first place.
The freedom to offend must be held absolutely sacrosanct.
I don't understand how the censors don't seem to get that. Freedom of speech was established specifically so the mechanisms of state could not be used to suppress dissent and ideas. Nobody has ever need a protected right to express opinions (or facts) which are popular, non controversial, and inoffensive. When was the last time these people heard of someone being tortured to death for the principled commit to the idea "Water is wet."? Never.
Free speech is all about the right to offend and dissent. If some topics are taboo than you haven't got any freedom at all. Because for the most part anything worth saying is going to offend someone somewhere somehow. Its really an all or nothing deal.
All the issues of free expression and if Facebook is or is not advancing the human condition by enabling Turks to communicate, vs likely being banned by refusing to filter on principle of free expression; does this even help.
I am not an expert on Islamic culture but I thought the prohibition was of depicting the "profit". Wont FB basically have to just ban the name Mohammad, which would offend lots of people. Otherwise what stops someone from posting a steaming cow pie, and tagging it "Mohammad the profit"? Is that not depicting the "profit" as a heap of shit? Is it an less offensive anyway?
he broke the rule of being wealthy which is to not take advantage of wealthier people/companies.
There fixed that for you
If they can pay 5 mil a year and it costs 10 mil to fix the issues, then I'll take the fine every time.
I don't even the likes of Verizon would act that way. I know short term profits are everything but so are anticipated future earnings, if the cost of fixing the problem was only equal to a few years of fines, they'd fix that rather than putting the anticipated futures fines in their SEC filings.
Now if it was going to be like 10 years or more before the fines exceeded the cost to fix it, than they might just decided to pay the fines as if they are a just another tax.
I think we should drop license plate requirements. I mean seriously driving around with a big personal identifier on my vehicle puts the lives of me and my family at risk. It makes it trivial for stalkers to track me. They can tell what place of business I am at just by observing my car is in the lot.
Some information is public. It just is the cops are all to happy to argue you have not fourth amendment protection against them setting up cameras all over town with OCR to recognize plates and compiling a big database that essentially knows where you are at all times. That's no problem I mean anyone can see your vehicle out in public view right and anyone could compile such information? sure..
As soon as the public does something remotely similar, but decidedly less intrusive in that it does not track specific cops. OMG its a problem won't somebody please think of these brave officers we are putting at risk!
Fuck that! If I have to be watched all the time so do they!
Regulation IS the problem. Had we done the principled thing and let AIG and Goldman burn when the time came it would have taken lots of big finance with it. There would have been plenty of churn as far as just who the 1% are. I would even guess some of them would have been left with less than nothing.
Oh but they would still have all kinds of physical property and hard assets. Yes but assets sometimes have a funny way of turning into liabilities when you don't have the case flow to manage them properly. Just imagine if you can't pay your home owners policy on your Mansion you can still get sued when someone breaks their leg while trespassing.
These guys are where they are entirely because of governments and regulation. Income inequality is greater than what existed in the gilded age! These levels of inequality are made possible by regulation and free market impediments, not for lack of them.
The biggest problem with home automation is 'life happens', eventually you want to put things into a state that was never originally anticipated.
Maybe the computer thinks, windows are open = turn off HVAC, or switch to fan only etc. Trouble is grandma stopped by and burned her Christmas cookies, smells terrible in the house, you want the windows open but you want to also leave the heat on, so you don't freeze.
Now you have to go override some "smart" system some where. It all ends up being just as much work as turning things on and off by hand was in the first place.
No the entire argument is silly. I could just as easily suggest drug test makes sense in fast food because who knows, someone with a drug addled mind might thing its a good idea to wipe the grill down with drain cleaner before cooking my burger.
No business have the right to do whatever they like and require whatever they want as conditions of employment, but they should not be encouraged to reach into the private lives of employees. Drug testing is intrusive, and costly. Requiring it should be a quick way to make sure your company isn't on any of those 'best places to work lists'
What companies should do is simply check their employees arrive for work in state they can do it effectively and safely in. At your fast food restaurant if the Assistant Manager can't be arsed to walk around and make sure workers don't appear to be to 'high' to do their jobs properly you got bigger problems than anything a drug test is going to uncover.
Someplace like Disney has tonnes of pre-open check lists and radio check-ins etc. If lower management can't spot operator that shows up to work drugged out than once again drug tests are not the answer. I have seen guys come it work with fevers before from flu and back fork lifts into other employees etc. Drug tests don't screen for flu. There is no substitute for a quick 'hello' and occasional walk arounds for employees who operate hazardous equipment or work in conditions that may be dangerous to them or others. Does matter if its a roller coaster or fryer filled with scalding oil! It also does not matter if said employee was 'tripping balls' 7 hours ago, it matters they are sober while on the job!
Yea, but know all the folks actually majoring in Crime, just copy their answers off the Criminology major in the front of the room who is just taking class as an elective. The Crime students never do the reading...
This is why our system is so messed up. This why the lobbyists and influence vendors have power. This why our laws are written such that not even the people who enact them really know what they mean.
The reason is voters like you, are willing to let them off the hook. When these guys sign their name to it they need to be accountable for it FULL STOP. You should not let them make excuses like oh well it was must pass....
No all those democrats who voted for the ACA better be willing to stand up and say proudly "I thought all the giveaways, deceptions, curtailment of individual freedoms, in the ACA were worth it to get something done." If they can't say that than they are not fit to represent you.
Same with this everyone who voted for this need to either agree with statements on climate, or admit there principle position on scientific integrity is subject to getting even relatively unimportant things done like Keystone XL.
We should base policy on what the majority of 'the people' (read voters without regard for what internationally other people want) wish to do, after they have been made aware of the risk a large number of scientists believe to exist.
That is a valid point. There is a lot Linux in the embedded and 'quasi-embedded' space that does never get updated.
That is a little different than what we normally think of as application servers that IT would be responsible for migrating. In the 'quasi-embedded' like the climate system you describe where there is basically a PC attached to some machinery you are correct. The opsticle to upgrading these things has little to do with Linux or Windows though, and everything to do with the machinery vendors unwillingness to QA or support anything other than their original configurations. You see the same situation happen with Windows boxen all the time as well just walk around any hospital or machine shop floor and you will see all sorts of DOS/Win9x/XP - pre SP2 about. Its not Microsoft's fault really nor any Linux distro maintainers where this happens.
As to the embedded space, routers, switches, headless controllers, PLCs. The amount of out data Linux out there with potentially major flaws is terrifying.
Why are you surprised the entire 'Affordable' care is really just a pile of giveaways to certain monied interests.
I mean come on the left the private insurance industry in place, while all but forcing the public to buy their product. The left them with the ability to set rates. The only real encouragement for them not gouge, is fear of political back lash AND essentially a government grantee that if they do somehow lose money they will be make whole.
There essentially no controls on the medical tort industry in it.
Nothing was done manage increasing drug costs
The medial device tax, the like one thing that industry might not like, is suspended.
Piles of money were spent hiring the incompetent to build the exchange.
The entire thing is theft all the way up and down.
Fair enough, but there are some really key differences between the Linux world and that of Windows and even Unix.
You distribution tends to package like 90+ % of the software on the system. The left over 10% is whatever in house app the server is running or 3rd party app you bought. All the libraries it uses, and support software that it uses database engines, etc typically are in the distribution. So the integration details library versions supported version issues are all taken care of for you.
On Windows this absolutely not the case. Things like databases, libraries for document rendering, and just about anything else you can think of is maintained outside the OS distribution. So Windows is where you upgrade and discover UAC totally breaks the version of ${SOFTWARE PACKGE} you have installed or changes to winHTTP cause all the web service calls to fail etc. Even if they mostly are other first party applications like SQL Server or Office. Its also true that its harder to isolate things. If you install something to /opt or /usr/local on a Linux box and those are separate partitions you can have reasonable confidence that blowing away / won't and reloading it from distribution media will leave you with a working app where you left it. Good luck with that on Windows unless you designed the package yourself and avoided the registry and tens of other possible pitfalls.
So again speaking in the general case its easier to go from RHEL 6.x to RHEL 7.x with an in place upgrade, as is true for most other Linux distros; however you do it, let package manager figurout distupdage or re-install a fresh /.
In most of my travels I have not seen 10+ year old Linux versions in production unless its at the same kind of shop that also does not care to patch or be on a supported version of Windows. Even in shops that are good about patch management get their WSUS updates applied etc ( I want to be fair to MS here these rarely if ever break anything) there is still lots of legitimate fear around upgrading an application server between major Windows versions. So in lots of cases Windows boxes tend to stay on whatever release for either the life of the hardware or the life of the app whichever is shorter. Linux boxes tend to be upgraded more frequently.
Google provide a la cart pricing.
Now that would be interesting. "You drove for a total of 6 hours and 51 minuets last month and major metro area, using your own vehicle presently valued at $X" You bill based on the risk you exposed us to is $Y.
That could be interesting.
With some quiet legislative changes to insurable interest [wikipedia.org] regulations, the likes of Goldman Sachs will soon be shorting your grandfather's life
Don't hold your breath there have been lots of folks who have tried this business. My ${relative} was a 30 year live insurance industry veteran. ${gender pronoun} was hired by a start-up as a expert. They had a full cabal of attorneys and folks to put up the capital on the line. The goal was to essentially establish an exchange or brokerage for other peoples life policies.
So for example a company takes out a life insurance policy on their CEO. CEO some years later. What generally happens today is the policy is allowed to lapse and the life insurer gets all the profit or the company is forced to continue servicing the policy for an indefinite period so they can eventually collect the benefit or exchange the policy for some cash value in some cases.
Their idea was you could sell the policy, the liability for paying the premium and the right to be the beneficiary. This way the policy could be sold for its net present value, rather than simply surrendered for its usually lower cash value or allowed to lapse.
Needless to say many trips to Washington were made and long SEC conversations were held and after several years they were forced to give the whole thing up. Insurable interest regulations were only a part of the problem. There are lots legal hurdles around 'who' is allowed to sell an insurance policy. The SEC was less than excited about a part other than the originator or a borker representing them doing it.
Don't worry about your precious tax dollars. I am sure they mostly paid for these things with civilly forfeited assets.
How lucky we are to live in a society where the police can just take money and property from people they don't like on some thin pretext of drug involvement. The best part is since there is expensive overhead associated with review or due process 100% of the revenue can be directly reinvesting in to further civil rights abuses ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ additional policing even more greatly reducing tax monies we would other wise have to commit to oppression ^H^H^H^H^H^H law enforcement.
The problem is people, that is why we set a government up in the first place; primarily to protect ourselves from each other.
So yes government is the problem. It never can be anything better than a necessary evil. It should be restricted, strangled, starved, and otherwise impeded to the point it can only barely achieve its goal of protecting people from each other, with minimal efficacy. To allow it to get any bigger or more capable than that as we have done not only invites abuse but assures it.
That's not what's meant by VPN in this context.
"context" don't make me laugh. There is no application of context to modern law. All sides take advantage. The words are stretched and the intents are ignored until the law can practically mean anything the AG wants it to mean that day. "VPN" already has plenty of interpretations in the tech world once the legal world gets hold of it, it is certain to be interpreted as just about anything that isn't a direct essentially the most direct path between hosts available using a plaintext protocol.
If you think otherwise you are crazy, or haven't been paying attention.
If it feels good than it is illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Where it all breaks down though is you need to get a public key from a trusted source.
For instance with SSL it works.
A)You ask for example.com and get 244.244.244.244 as the DNS result.
B)244.244.244.244 responds and presents a certificate (public key) for example.com
C)You check the certificate for example.com is legit by verification of a signature done with a 3rd party private key and check that with a public key you already have (root CA list). You can now trust 244.244.244.244's claim to be example.com and use that public key to decipher message sent to you with its private key. (which you will use to exchange a symmetric key, but that's getting off topic).
The problem with your example above with e-mail is that Bob has no way to authenticate the original message from Alice. He can't know that the public key he has been sent really from Alice and not his wife spoofing Alice's address because she suspects Alice is a mistress. Bob is how we say 'screwed'.
The only way it can work is if someone counter signs for Alice that Bob already trusts. With SSL and the 3rd party CA system its do able because Companies only have so many Web servers they are willing to pay Verisign or GeoTrust to essentially act as a notary. They won't do this for every employee that wants to send mail, the general public can't be arsed to do it either. So the CA model does not work.
Hence we have the web of trust model. This depends on your belief that most people in that web are responsible about who they 'trust' as authentic sources of keys. It assumes that most senders properly guard their private keys, or even understand they need to guard them and against what. There is zero evidence to suggest the general public has this understanding or capability.
Then there is the problem of web mail. If everyone is just going to hand Google (I am picking on them because of the popularity of GMail) their private keys we are ONE breach away from the entire system crashing down. If you implement some kind of client side encryption with javascript we ware still ONE breach away, someone gets in and replaces the javascript with a malicious one, your client trusts it because well it came from Google's server. It also makes webmail inherently unportable because you have to bring your key with you and what enter it into every untrusted systems all the time?
The GP is right, the problem is key management.
Yea, people at facebook.