I wouldn't put it past them to say "okay, then you won't mind if I zero out all the stuff that you claim doesn't have any data". I would. Remember we're dealing with customs officers here -- this isn't exactly something they'd be trained for. Either they'll image the laptop, or grab it, or not. They're not going to do foresincs at the scene.
Also, keep in mind that, generally, losing data may be preferable to letting it fall into the wrong hands. Besides, depending where you were, there's a strong possibility that you'll have had plenty of opportunity to upload that data via the Internet, or back it up to a USB key hiding in your shoe.
See, the problem is, there can be an unlimited number of encrypted volumes -- they can even be nested. So no one can ever prove that there are no more hidden, encrypted volumes. If someone demands that you show them the second one, you can show them a second one -- and not the third, fourth, or fifth ones.
So unless you're suggesting that anyone using Truecrypt, for any purpose, will be detained indefinitely, it seems like a pretty solid bet.
(which additionally is useless against any decent forensic disk imaging and long term analysis) Even if it's an encrypted drive? If they can crack RSA and AES now, I'm scared.
So you're saying that a professional is able to crack any AES? I don't think so.
And yes, stenography is good, but it's ultimately security through obscurity. I'll show them what they want to see for the sake of convenience, but ultimately, if they find me out, I'd rather be secure and scream about my rights.
It's pretty trivial to make it impossible for them to get the information.
Assuming they're that smart, give it three layers. The first layer is for convenience -- "See, nothing here. Just a bunch of pictures for my grandmother."
The second layer is if they become suspicious of those high-entropy random bytes -- and you make sure to spread high-entropy random bytes throughout the disk when you first format. "Well, you see, I formatted with high-entropy random bytes so no one would know how many more hidden volumes I have. But this is it. Really, there are no more hidden volumes in here."
At which point, you're back to square 1 -- they can't ever prove that you've given them all the passwords.
And how long could you run those dells? You at least need Internet and power, and for it to be effective, you're going to need that, plus storage, all over the world.
Unfortunately, it is still a logical fallacy, so winning an argument with it is a hollow victory for anyone really interested in determining truth (as opposed to just feeling right). I generally only use it when I already have an assumption that I am right, or at the very least, that I have nothing to learn from this debate with this person.
On a purely individual level, one can actually have proof (i.e. God speaks to you in your head). Wouldn't be proof to me, or at least, it depends what he would say. And still, the most that could possibly be proven is that the voice in my head belongs to a powerful entity with abilities beyond my own -- or that I am insane. There is no way to prove that it belongs to the all-seeing, all-knowing being described in major religions.
It's like "I think therefore I am". I know I'm sentient. I thought that just proved that you exist. In fact, the correct translation is "I am aware, therefore I exist."
And that's also an entirely different matter. The fact that you are aware proves your existence, in some sense, for some value of "existence" -- what does it actually mean to exist?
This I can see may have some practical merit in day to day life: If they are smart enough to be worth taking the time to debate/discuss with, they'll call you out on the burden-of-proof fallacy. As you've done. I was about to make that point, too.
I wouldn't assume that. I feel it's best to never assume anything. I never believe anything. I assume things to get through the day.
For example, I can't believe any of our physical laws -- all of them are based on inductive reasoning. My favorite phrasing is: "No matter how many times we drop a stone and it falls to the floor, you never know -- next time, it might just as easily float to the ceiling."
However, it would be very difficult to go through life if I was constantly afraid of gravity turning off -- I'd never be outside, for one thing. So I live -- I walk, even -- with the assumption that gravity exists.
Of course, you were probably talking about assuming things about people. I try not to, but if someone comes to me with a flawed premise initially, like "The universe couldn't have just been random chance!" I'd say it's a pretty good bet that I can out-reason that person easily.
a simple task is still a task, and still takes time, will generally will take longer than expected, and once you take ownership of a task, then it is something that will require ongoing attention. I just doubt that it will take longer to create and maintain, in total, than it would take to struggle with something like SourceForge. (Having said that, I haven't actually used SourceForge...)
I'm willing to bet you could setup a sourceforge account, add a brief blurb and upload your first release in less time than it would take you to find a hosting provider and get the details (payment method etc.) sorted. You lose, but only because I already have these -- I have a server in my house to play with, and the company I work with has servers that it would probably be willing to lend to an open source project.
Or you could spend more time on the script to parse the major version number from the version, but that is more time away from your project and adds more parts to the script that may go wrong. That's pretty trivial, actually. Maybe not for Make, but I don't think I'd be using a Makefile.
And what you are talking in your last paragraph is accessing the site as a user, not a project manager, and I'm not sure how that differs with the proposed auto script to upload a tarball, which can (and has) been done equally poorly. However, once you start doing it well, the amount of time you'll spend adding and managing docs, or even polishing the website, makes the amount of work required to setup a barebones site in the first place pale in comparison.
That, and it increases the probability that you'll want something custom on the server side -- for example, JavaDoc/RDoc/etc documentation generated from source. Post a release, and auto-generate appropriate documentation. Can Sourceforge do that?
Very early on, your solution wins, though I might choose something like Google Code. Even so, I suspect my next project will be hosted out of my house until I get Slashdotted (or something similar).
Yes, I understood your concept. That still requires unique symmetric keys for each user, though, right?
So still not as useful, for a static page, as a single signature that can be cached for all users, meaning you've got your CPU usage down to nothing until the page changes.
Also, they're not mutually exclusive. We're both right! Let's get both our ideas into the next https rfc, or however we'd do that!
How many of us had the good luck to be raised without theism, so that by the time we were adults and capable of making our own decisions, we were already atheists?
I'd argue that a majority of atheists were theists of some kind, once. Einstein was raised Jewish. It seems likely that he believed in a Jewish god at one time, and rejected it later. The question is whether any of his quotes on religion came from when he was still Jewish.
Someone else finally brought up his clarification of his use of the word "religion".
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.
That's a very friendly way of putting it, on course with what the various religions bash into our heads: That not believing in their bullshit is a kind of "fall from grace", that it has to do with "doubt" and "disbelief". That wasn't my intention.
All I meant to imply was that the change from theist to atheist is slow and gradual -- not that it is a "fall from grace" or a negative thing. That, and that there is often a change from theist to atheist -- most of us were not lucky enough to have atheist parents.
Relying on burden of proof weakens your argument. Disclaimer: I'm not GP.
I like burden of proof because it's often the quickest way to end the discussion -- because theists do not (and cannot) have proof. Demanding that they show me proof is the quickest way to make them go away -- or to lead them into an actually logical argument, where I can beat the metaphorical snot out of them.
I call myself atheist or agnostic, depending on the context. But the words are loaded...
Atheism can be divided into "hard atheism" and "soft atheism" -- where hard atheists have belief of absence, and soft atheists have absence of belief. Agnosticism is pretty much "soft atheism."
The reason I don't like to call myself an agnostic is, I'm finding I like the word "atheist" much better. Agnostic literally means "not Gnostic", which is very different than what we often use it for. Atheist means "not Theist", which is closer to what I am -- I am not a theist, and not religious.
The fact that many definitions of God are logically impossible or morally reprehensible doesn't hurt.
No, where I use "agnostic" is when I feel like arguing from David Hume -- that pretty much all we think we "know" is suspect, even causality. But it's usually easier -- more convenient, even? -- to use words like "I know" and "I believe" in common speech, even when I really know nothing, and believe nothing.
His theory proves the universe is self aware. Mass is simply energy like everything else, and energy is never created or destroyed. WTF? How did you make that leap?
I can see why others don't want to give you serious replies. That's like saying "Electricity flows from positive to negative, therefore IT'S ALIVE!" Complete non-sequitur.
Athiests have faith in the idea that a God doesn't, and shouldn't exist. How they rationalize it is their business, but these beliefs are the core of athiesm. I see, so you really don't know anything about atheism. Go read.
You're not much of a philosopher if you assume that absence of belief == belief of absence.
If there is no randomness in the universe, then everything in the universe is deliberate, and this is the entire basis for intelligent design. Again, WTF?
No, everything in the universe is deterministic. For all you know, God exists, but it was really a big accident.
If all events are caused, then even the big bang had to have a cause. It proves no intelligence behind the Big Bang. It also doesn't prove that there was a "first cause" -- tried and failed.
I'm a philosopher myself. An exceedingly poor one. Take a philosophy course. Learn how to form a logical argument. Then come back.
If the universe is nature, and nature is just self awareness, then the universe is self aware. You're right, that does follow -- but you've got a false premise. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure it out.
Einstein did not believe the universe was randomly generated, this means he believed in intelligent design whether or not it's a Christian God or just some self aware universe, he believed in a God. Nope. Fail.
He never said self-aware, nor did he suggest anything about how it was created. That's more Hawking's department, anyway.
Athiests believe the universe is a complete accident and that everything in the universe is random. And you know pretty much nothing about atheists.
Nothing Einstein has ever said in any of his writings support that he believes that the universe is random. No, in fact, he said just the opposite. He ignored quantum mechanics because of that.
However, the fact that he recognized a symmetry in the Universe in no way suggests that he believed in a creator, or that the "God" he believed in was even sentient. He claimed to believe in Spinoza's God. Quoting that Wikipedia article:
Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "to stand beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part. Sounds to me like Spinoza's God created nothing, but is everything. You could almost say that Spinoza was very much an atheist -- he believed in nothing more than matter, the physical world that we see. But he believed that this was what the Jewish God really is -- kind of like the world being created in six days has to be a metaphor, because we know it wasn't.
He also said:
I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. And also:
I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind. So in this case, he did not believe that the "lawful harmony of the world" could allow for randomness, or could itself be an emergent pattern from randomness.
Here's a question: Has he ever said anything about faith? Or about how God loves... anything? Or how God will do anything? That would be a clear mark of a man with religious convictions: "God will protect me," or even "In God we trust."
Instead, we get the equivalent of, really, "God bless you" when someone sneezes.
He also said:
I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind. My own interpretation of that is, he appreciates the beauty and intelligence of how the world is put together, almost reveres its symmetry -- but certainly doesn't believe that there's a white-bearded man in the sky. The idea is that one can have an almost religious experience in the form of an equation, but the "I do not believe in a personal God" says that he doesn't believe praying is going to do any good -- if God is Nature, then Nature certainly doesn't care about your personal problems.
Oh, that, and does anyone want to date these quotes? It seems very likely that his beliefs changed; after all, how many of us were born or raised atheist? It seems mostly something that you come to on your own -- having once believed, you start to have doubts, which eventually turn into disbelief.
I was trying to say that if you make it simple they will come. Nope. A couple of things Freenet does by design, such as encrypting the local store for plausible deniability, are pretty much incompatible with certain convenience features of BitTorrent, such as the fact that it costs me no disk space to seed a torrent while I use the files I've downloaded. (Unless it's a retarded torrent of a multipart RAR...)
The other issue is performance. Freenets architecture should be able to compete on performance too because more hosts should be available than on BT. Maybe, the way Usenet can compete with BT -- by leeching off people who have nothing to do with your torrent.
You see, BitTorrent's speed is pretty much proportional to the popularity of a given torrent. The same can be said of Freenet, but with BitTorrent, this extends to most performance -- you only use disk space, bandwidth, and CPU for torrents you're actually downloading. With Freenet, all three are consumed for things you are downloading, and for things others are downloading through you. You can limit them, of course -- at the expense of the performance of your node, and, by extension, at the expense of your own performance.
So, even if Freenet was as easy as BitTorrent, it would by definition be slower for popular torrents, and more wasteful -- so most likely slower for everything.
The one advantage it has, from a usability perspective, is that more applications can operate over it. But all of them are dog-slow, so...
Slashdot Mirror
Also, keep in mind that, generally, losing data may be preferable to letting it fall into the wrong hands. Besides, depending where you were, there's a strong possibility that you'll have had plenty of opportunity to upload that data via the Internet, or back it up to a USB key hiding in your shoe.
See, the problem is, there can be an unlimited number of encrypted volumes -- they can even be nested. So no one can ever prove that there are no more hidden, encrypted volumes. If someone demands that you show them the second one, you can show them a second one -- and not the third, fourth, or fifth ones.
So unless you're suggesting that anyone using Truecrypt, for any purpose, will be detained indefinitely, it seems like a pretty solid bet.
...Child porn? WTF?
As if there aren't easier and cheaper ways to smuggle that into the US than customs.
Like, I don't know, the internet!
Yes, my favorite bumper sticker before the 2004 election was "Regime change starts at home."
So you're saying that a professional is able to crack any AES? I don't think so.
And yes, stenography is good, but it's ultimately security through obscurity. I'll show them what they want to see for the sake of convenience, but ultimately, if they find me out, I'd rather be secure and scream about my rights.
It's pretty trivial to make it impossible for them to get the information.
Assuming they're that smart, give it three layers. The first layer is for convenience -- "See, nothing here. Just a bunch of pictures for my grandmother."
The second layer is if they become suspicious of those high-entropy random bytes -- and you make sure to spread high-entropy random bytes throughout the disk when you first format. "Well, you see, I formatted with high-entropy random bytes so no one would know how many more hidden volumes I have. But this is it. Really, there are no more hidden volumes in here."
At which point, you're back to square 1 -- they can't ever prove that you've given them all the passwords.
Bonus points for the Santana quote!
And how long could you run those dells? You at least need Internet and power, and for it to be effective, you're going to need that, plus storage, all over the world.
I'm willing to take that risk, Anonymous Coward.
Liberty or Death, remember?
When did we get so fucking complacent and cowardly?
And in that article, it was also mentioned that the US government controls enough points to make a botnet mostly pointless.
The real reason is probably to hide who's doing the attack.
And that's also an entirely different matter. The fact that you are aware proves your existence, in some sense, for some value of "existence" -- what does it actually mean to exist? This I can see may have some practical merit in day to day life: If they are smart enough to be worth taking the time to debate/discuss with, they'll call you out on the burden-of-proof fallacy. As you've done. I was about to make that point, too. I wouldn't assume that. I feel it's best to never assume anything. I never believe anything. I assume things to get through the day.
For example, I can't believe any of our physical laws -- all of them are based on inductive reasoning. My favorite phrasing is: "No matter how many times we drop a stone and it falls to the floor, you never know -- next time, it might just as easily float to the ceiling."
However, it would be very difficult to go through life if I was constantly afraid of gravity turning off -- I'd never be outside, for one thing. So I live -- I walk, even -- with the assumption that gravity exists.
Of course, you were probably talking about assuming things about people. I try not to, but if someone comes to me with a flawed premise initially, like "The universe couldn't have just been random chance!" I'd say it's a pretty good bet that I can out-reason that person easily.
That, and it increases the probability that you'll want something custom on the server side -- for example, JavaDoc/RDoc/etc documentation generated from source. Post a release, and auto-generate appropriate documentation. Can Sourceforge do that?
Very early on, your solution wins, though I might choose something like Google Code. Even so, I suspect my next project will be hosted out of my house until I get Slashdotted (or something similar).
Yes, I understood your concept. That still requires unique symmetric keys for each user, though, right?
So still not as useful, for a static page, as a single signature that can be cached for all users, meaning you've got your CPU usage down to nothing until the page changes.
Also, they're not mutually exclusive. We're both right! Let's get both our ideas into the next https rfc, or however we'd do that!
I'll rephrase that, then.
How many of us had the good luck to be raised without theism, so that by the time we were adults and capable of making our own decisions, we were already atheists?
I'd argue that a majority of atheists were theists of some kind, once. Einstein was raised Jewish. It seems likely that he believed in a Jewish god at one time, and rejected it later. The question is whether any of his quotes on religion came from when he was still Jewish.
All I meant to imply was that the change from theist to atheist is slow and gradual -- not that it is a "fall from grace" or a negative thing. That, and that there is often a change from theist to atheist -- most of us were not lucky enough to have atheist parents.
I like burden of proof because it's often the quickest way to end the discussion -- because theists do not (and cannot) have proof. Demanding that they show me proof is the quickest way to make them go away -- or to lead them into an actually logical argument, where I can beat the metaphorical snot out of them.
I call myself atheist or agnostic, depending on the context. But the words are loaded...
Atheism can be divided into "hard atheism" and "soft atheism" -- where hard atheists have belief of absence, and soft atheists have absence of belief. Agnosticism is pretty much "soft atheism."
The reason I don't like to call myself an agnostic is, I'm finding I like the word "atheist" much better. Agnostic literally means "not Gnostic", which is very different than what we often use it for. Atheist means "not Theist", which is closer to what I am -- I am not a theist, and not religious.
The fact that many definitions of God are logically impossible or morally reprehensible doesn't hurt.
No, where I use "agnostic" is when I feel like arguing from David Hume -- that pretty much all we think we "know" is suspect, even causality. But it's usually easier -- more convenient, even? -- to use words like "I know" and "I believe" in common speech, even when I really know nothing, and believe nothing.
I can see why others don't want to give you serious replies. That's like saying "Electricity flows from positive to negative, therefore IT'S ALIVE!" Complete non-sequitur. Athiests have faith in the idea that a God doesn't, and shouldn't exist. How they rationalize it is their business, but these beliefs are the core of athiesm. I see, so you really don't know anything about atheism. Go read.
You're not much of a philosopher if you assume that absence of belief == belief of absence. If there is no randomness in the universe, then everything in the universe is deliberate, and this is the entire basis for intelligent design. Again, WTF?
No, everything in the universe is deterministic. For all you know, God exists, but it was really a big accident. If all events are caused, then even the big bang had to have a cause. It proves no intelligence behind the Big Bang. It also doesn't prove that there was a "first cause" -- tried and failed. I'm a philosopher myself. An exceedingly poor one. Take a philosophy course. Learn how to form a logical argument. Then come back. If the universe is nature, and nature is just self awareness, then the universe is self aware. You're right, that does follow -- but you've got a false premise. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure it out.
He never said self-aware, nor did he suggest anything about how it was created. That's more Hawking's department, anyway. Athiests believe the universe is a complete accident and that everything in the universe is random. And you know pretty much nothing about atheists. Nothing Einstein has ever said in any of his writings support that he believes that the universe is random. No, in fact, he said just the opposite. He ignored quantum mechanics because of that.
However, the fact that he recognized a symmetry in the Universe in no way suggests that he believed in a creator, or that the "God" he believed in was even sentient. He claimed to believe in Spinoza's God. Quoting that Wikipedia article: Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "to stand beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part. Sounds to me like Spinoza's God created nothing, but is everything. You could almost say that Spinoza was very much an atheist -- he believed in nothing more than matter, the physical world that we see. But he believed that this was what the Jewish God really is -- kind of like the world being created in six days has to be a metaphor, because we know it wasn't.
Here's a question: Has he ever said anything about faith? Or about how God loves... anything? Or how God will do anything? That would be a clear mark of a man with religious convictions: "God will protect me," or even "In God we trust."
Instead, we get the equivalent of, really, "God bless you" when someone sneezes.
Oh, that, and does anyone want to date these quotes? It seems very likely that his beliefs changed; after all, how many of us were born or raised atheist? It seems mostly something that you come to on your own -- having once believed, you start to have doubts, which eventually turn into disbelief.
You see, BitTorrent's speed is pretty much proportional to the popularity of a given torrent. The same can be said of Freenet, but with BitTorrent, this extends to most performance -- you only use disk space, bandwidth, and CPU for torrents you're actually downloading. With Freenet, all three are consumed for things you are downloading, and for things others are downloading through you. You can limit them, of course -- at the expense of the performance of your node, and, by extension, at the expense of your own performance.
So, even if Freenet was as easy as BitTorrent, it would by definition be slower for popular torrents, and more wasteful -- so most likely slower for everything.
The one advantage it has, from a usability perspective, is that more applications can operate over it. But all of them are dog-slow, so...
A dick who got modded +5 insightful.
If you actually have a counterpoint, go ahead. If you think I took something out of context, show me where.
I really despise this kind of post, where no comment is actually made about the substance of a post, only about the way in which it was presented.
Fair enough, but take away Zed Shaw and we make the OBSD guys look like Teletubbies. Take away DHH and we're actually a downright loving community.