"But unlike private companies, the Postal Service is exempt from federal, state and local taxes and fees. Likewise, most zoning laws are of no consequence to this monopoly, and it can ignore parking tickets and vehicle licensing fees. The post office also has access to taxpayer- subsidized government credit and preferential customs agreements."
"Private companies are prohibited from charging anything less than twice the post office's price for the same service."
"Postal facilities and assets were acquired through monopoly power. The USPS now uses those facilities and assets to compete with the private sector."
"straying from its government-mandated services: for example, [sic] has gone into the business of marketing prepaid phone calling cards for long-distance calls"
"The USPS now uses those facilities and assets to compete with the private sector. "
"In 1993, armed postal inspectors entered the headquarters of Equifax Inc. in Atlanta. The postal inspectors demanded to know if all the mail sent by Equifax through Federal Express was indeed "extremely urgent," as mandated by the Postal Service's criteria for suspension of the Private Express Statutes. Equifax paid the Postal Service a fine of $30,000. The Postal Service reportedly collected $521,000 for similar fines from twenty-one mailers between 1991 and 1994."
USPS uses predatory pricing to undercut other businesses: "The USPS lost $200 million in 2000, $1.7 billion in 2001, and $676 million in 2002, but continues to operate. Such losses would likely have driven a private firm into bankruptcy."
"Because it can borrow from the Federal Financing Bank, it enjoys an explicit government debt guarantee."
"exempt from paying investors an expected rate of return on their invested capital. "
"USPS is not subject to a bankruptcy constraint"
It is exempt from a host of costly government regulations, including antitrust law and SEC disclosure requirements. It does not have to apply for building permits.
The post office is way behind on equipment needed to do that. 2nd class and 3rd class mail that requires presorting is barely set up to work now at their BMC's. And that's because of bundling. For 2nd class you bundle up your newspapers or magazines for a certain 5 or 3 digit zip code for easier handling. Multiple bundles get thrown into a bag, which has it's own barcode. If you're a huge mailer, then multiple bags for a same region can be put on pallets, which have their own barcode.
So basically, as this stuff gets moved around the country, huge amounts of mail gets only tagged at the larger "unit" level, until it reaches it's regional destination, upon which it gets broken down to into the smaller units with their barcodes, etc.
But with 1st class mail, there's just no way you can scan them all at each stop on the way. Not only that, but scanning requires standardized sizes to fly through their machines without snagging. That's another service feature of 1st class mail.
1st class mail gives you these features:
1) No sorting needed (not to mention, how do you sort 1 envelope)
2) non standard sizes allowed
3) Hand writing allowed
RFID's would be perfect though. As much as I hate the idea of retail stores using RFID's, all the problems I just mentioned would be perfect if stamps had embedded RFID's. Man, can you imagine the sheer amount of dynamic data being crunched... makes my knees shake.
What I don't get is that the USPS already has this in place. It's in their overnight and 2 day services, and many other expsensive services. And when I say expensive, I mean similar to what UPS and Fedex offer also.
So there's nothing really new here. What the article could/should say is that they're CANCELING a service. Which is... basically what 1st class mail is today.
They've wanted to crush hand-written addresses on letters for a long long time so that they could OCR everything. Or require barcodes. That way they could use all the equipment already set up in their BMC's. But almost all 1st class mail is casual correspondance -- hand writing. Non-sorting. And requiring all mail to be registered mail will just kill casual correspondance. (Basically you'd might as well use email)
Ordinary citizens have gained a lot on new technology and the possibillity of anonymous communication such as mail through their ISP
What do you mean by this? anonymous emailing through your ISP? Surely you jest. You can trace headers to find out where the email came from. You can send a subpoena to the ISP like the RIAA to get name-address from an IP number. ISP's hold on to your email "forever" even if you "delete" it.
Maybe you're thinking of encrypting an email. Well sure, you could, but you can just as easily encrypt a message in the snail mail you send.
SO I'm a little confused what you mean by anonymous communication through one's ISP!
Right. Because getting out of the truck takes longer than writing a nasty note.
For a company that constantly tries to pretend they're a business (and not a government service) they certainly forget about being nice to the customer.
Then again, when I say that , visions of RIAA come to mind.
Must be nice to be a "business" that doesn't have to pay property taxes, or pay for employee's government benefits, gets government sponsored building & vehicle contracts, vehicle contracts, and a slew of other normal corporate hurdles.
Hey, maybe they could start making and selling their own boxes, envelopes, tape, and cut into 3M's profit margins. Oh wait...
Maybe they could start spending their money on commericals and sponsor sporting teams. Oh wait...
parallel zip drive? Yowzers, that hurts just thinking about it.
If you had to do that, why didn't you pop open the laptop, pull the hard drive, put it in your main desktop computer on an IDE 3.5->2.5 converter cable, and load the data there? Then pop in, and install from the HD?
That's how we did it with the IOpener. I'm guessing you must have been in a jam, and didn't have the right tools. cool post tho
I believe it only needs to read the key at bootup. After that, it resides in the daughter-card's RAM.
Otherwise... when would it reference the key? Every file? Every bit? I think reading the key would kill the 'on-the-fly' 1.1gb speed it was bragging about.
In a practical viewpoint, it *needs* to work this way, otherwise, it's not secure at all, since the key is with the computer 100% of the time when it's up. You'll get busted with your pants down, so to speak.
So, step 1: Look around your neigborhood suspiciously.
Step 2: Fetch your key from the attic crawlspace.
Step 3: Look around outside again.
Step 4: Run down to the basement and boot the machine up with the key in it.
Step 5: Run to the attic and hide the key.
Step 6: Jerk off to the pr0n, or whatever.
Step 7: Turn computer off when not using it.
you're looking at the security of your data staying encrypted only half way (half assed). Do you want your data encrypted or not? Do you want it protected against a search warrant in the middle of the night, while at work, or while you're watching a streamed DIVX movie form it, or not?
If you're toting your hard drive over to a friend's house then *that* is when you're most vulnerable. You want it encrypted then too. They'll bust you while pulling out of your drive way too.
If you said no to any of those questions, then the data you have isn't that important to stay encrypted. If you want "some" security, there is plenty of software that can encrypt and decrtypt a drive as you wish.
To be truly secure, you have to have some sort of "in the box", non-connectedness.
Besides if there's any data you're willing to 'take out of the box' and work with in an unencrypted manner, then just click and grab it to another hard drive while in your File Folder System. (And then pull that drive to take to a friend's, if you must). Either that, or get your friend to have the same motherboard.
As someone mentioned earlier... they would probably make a full copy of the drive first, and they would use your fake key against that first. They would then see that you 'maliciously' tried to cover up evidence. You'd get busted for that, and also be asked to hand over the real key.
Have you done the GPG encrypted DVDR's? I was looking into doing the same thing for backups. I am curious how you shared the keys with your friends, and the speed of decryption.
The point of having it encrypted is not so you can pull it and put it into another uncrypted machine. If that's your goal, every other mb will work for you. (Even this one will if you don't use this option)
If you needed to move the data, you'll just have to boot it up and start copying over your 100T line.
I agree, and I think anyone thinking through this would see the same hole you do. But it's not really a hole, because we're not talking about magic.
For instance, this would be useful if you had a 3TB home media center with about 15,000 mp3 albums, and a 1000 DIVX movies. (Just for instance)
This should not be on some network. It would be standalone, or a closed network if streaming to your tv system, etc.
If you wanted to share through the internet, then you need to be sending it encrypted. Either using Waste, on a private P2P network, or whatever. Even then you're not safe, because if the person you're sending it to is an RIAA spook, then it doesn't matter if your computer is in a fire-pit. You're busted. That is why I said it wasn't magic before.
If you got busted for sharing a 3 movies/albums on your private P2P Waste network, then you could get busted for 3 counts of copyright infringement. At least with this encryption, you wouldn't then be busted for having 16,000 counts of copyright infringement.
Losing the key. Well, wouldn't the penalty for losing a key less than the 97 million dollars the RIAA could sue you for?
Would "pleading the 5th" work here?
Also, these cases are all about building evidence. If they're going to bust your door down to confiscate your computers to prove you have a 2 TB digital library, then it all starts with probably cause. They have probably cause that you have this in your home. They get a search warrant form the judge. They then bust in looking for it, find it and use it against you in the court of law (Criminal suit). However, if they don't find it (because everything you have is encrypted) then they don't have that evidence. Consider it flushing the cocaine down the toilet...no?
Yes, it would be very cool to see. I'm sure there's nothing compromising about it though! There is no technical need.
If it is able to encrypt a harddrive at the beginning (with FDISK) with ANY key you have on that keychain, then I'm sure it is only used for superfast hardware encryption and decryption on the fly.
It will store the key in it's own RAM (that way you don't have to have the keychain plugged in after initial bootup) and will disappear when powered down.
I've been thinking that having the computer plugged into an X10 plugin would be the solution to that. Just have to have the remote-control handy, so you can click OFF.
Years ago on slashdot, when the first article talked about it, they were offering a free sample. Only had to pay for shipping. So I sent away from it, and much like the sea monkeys I got as a kid, these were great. Came with a plugin (with a small antenna) and a big remote (with lots of buttons--allowing you to remotely turn on and off many things--but you'd have to buy more).
Anyway, we use it on a very hard to reach lamp that is next to the bed. It's hard to reach, and hard to turn the knob on & off. We use the remote instead, and from our bed when we're done reading.
Anyway, got off topic, but this would be a great way to have an unobtrusive panic button handy
Nope. You have to click on the article, and click on the "Secur" picture. THere you will see that the drive connects to a daughter-card thingy, that also has a USB connection, and at the end is a USB keychain--which has your special key.
Slashdot Mirror
CATO Institute
"But unlike private companies, the Postal Service is exempt from federal, state and local taxes and fees. Likewise, most zoning laws are of no consequence to this monopoly, and it can ignore parking tickets and vehicle licensing fees. The post office also has access to taxpayer- subsidized government credit and preferential customs agreements."
"Private companies are prohibited from charging anything less than twice the post office's price for the same service."
"Postal facilities and assets were acquired through monopoly power. The USPS now uses those facilities and assets to compete with the private sector."
"straying from its government-mandated services: for example, [sic] has gone into the business of marketing prepaid phone calling cards for long-distance calls"
"The USPS now uses those facilities and assets to compete with the private sector. "
"In 1993, armed postal inspectors entered the headquarters of Equifax Inc. in Atlanta. The postal inspectors demanded to know if all the mail sent by Equifax through Federal Express was indeed "extremely urgent," as mandated by the Postal Service's criteria for suspension of the Private Express Statutes. Equifax paid the Postal Service a fine of $30,000. The Postal Service reportedly collected $521,000 for similar fines from twenty-one mailers between 1991 and 1994."
USPS uses predatory pricing to undercut other businesses: "The USPS lost $200 million in 2000, $1.7 billion in 2001, and $676 million in 2002, but continues to operate. Such losses would likely have driven a private firm into bankruptcy."
"Because it can borrow from the Federal Financing Bank, it enjoys an explicit government debt guarantee."
"exempt from paying investors an expected rate of return on their invested capital. "
"USPS is not subject to a bankruptcy constraint"
It is exempt from a host of costly government regulations, including antitrust law and SEC disclosure requirements. It does not have to apply for building permits.
Last but not least: It has, at various times, received direct cash subsidies
The post office is way behind on equipment needed to do that. 2nd class and 3rd class mail that requires presorting is barely set up to work now at their BMC's. And that's because of bundling. For 2nd class you bundle up your newspapers or magazines for a certain 5 or 3 digit zip code for easier handling. Multiple bundles get thrown into a bag, which has it's own barcode. If you're a huge mailer, then multiple bags for a same region can be put on pallets, which have their own barcode.
So basically, as this stuff gets moved around the country, huge amounts of mail gets only tagged at the larger "unit" level, until it reaches it's regional destination, upon which it gets broken down to into the smaller units with their barcodes, etc.
But with 1st class mail, there's just no way you can scan them all at each stop on the way. Not only that, but scanning requires standardized sizes to fly through their machines without snagging. That's another service feature of 1st class mail.
1st class mail gives you these features:
1) No sorting needed (not to mention, how do you sort 1 envelope)
2) non standard sizes allowed
3) Hand writing allowed
RFID's would be perfect though. As much as I hate the idea of retail stores using RFID's, all the problems I just mentioned would be perfect if stamps had embedded RFID's. Man, can you imagine the sheer amount of dynamic data being crunched... makes my knees shake.
So there's nothing really new here. What the article could/should say is that they're CANCELING a service. Which is... basically what 1st class mail is today.
They've wanted to crush hand-written addresses on letters for a long long time so that they could OCR everything. Or require barcodes. That way they could use all the equipment already set up in their BMC's. But almost all 1st class mail is casual correspondance -- hand writing. Non-sorting. And requiring all mail to be registered mail will just kill casual correspondance. (Basically you'd might as well use email)
What do you mean by this? anonymous emailing through your ISP? Surely you jest. You can trace headers to find out where the email came from. You can send a subpoena to the ISP like the RIAA to get name-address from an IP number. ISP's hold on to your email "forever" even if you "delete" it.
Maybe you're thinking of encrypting an email. Well sure, you could, but you can just as easily encrypt a message in the snail mail you send.
SO I'm a little confused what you mean by anonymous communication through one's ISP!
For a company that constantly tries to pretend they're a business (and not a government service) they certainly forget about being nice to the customer.
Then again, when I say that , visions of RIAA come to mind.
Must be nice to be a "business" that doesn't have to pay property taxes, or pay for employee's government benefits, gets government sponsored building & vehicle contracts, vehicle contracts, and a slew of other normal corporate hurdles.
Hey, maybe they could start making and selling their own boxes, envelopes, tape, and cut into 3M's profit margins. Oh wait...
Maybe they could start spending their money on commericals and sponsor sporting teams. Oh wait...
If you had to do that, why didn't you pop open the laptop, pull the hard drive, put it in your main desktop computer on an IDE 3.5->2.5 converter cable, and load the data there? Then pop in, and install from the HD?
That's how we did it with the IOpener. I'm guessing you must have been in a jam, and didn't have the right tools. cool post tho
Because I don't own a license to it either!! :>
Otherwise... when would it reference the key? Every file? Every bit? I think reading the key would kill the 'on-the-fly' 1.1gb speed it was bragging about.
In a practical viewpoint, it *needs* to work this way, otherwise, it's not secure at all, since the key is with the computer 100% of the time when it's up. You'll get busted with your pants down, so to speak.
So, step 1: Look around your neigborhood suspiciously.
Step 2: Fetch your key from the attic crawlspace.
Step 3: Look around outside again.
Step 4: Run down to the basement and boot the machine up with the key in it.
Step 5: Run to the attic and hide the key.
Step 6: Jerk off to the pr0n, or whatever.
Step 7: Turn computer off when not using it.
If you're toting your hard drive over to a friend's house then *that* is when you're most vulnerable. You want it encrypted then too. They'll bust you while pulling out of your drive way too.
If you said no to any of those questions, then the data you have isn't that important to stay encrypted. If you want "some" security, there is plenty of software that can encrypt and decrtypt a drive as you wish.
To be truly secure, you have to have some sort of "in the box", non-connectedness.
Besides if there's any data you're willing to 'take out of the box' and work with in an unencrypted manner, then just click and grab it to another hard drive while in your File Folder System. (And then pull that drive to take to a friend's, if you must). Either that, or get your friend to have the same motherboard.
As someone mentioned earlier... they would probably make a full copy of the drive first, and they would use your fake key against that first. They would then see that you 'maliciously' tried to cover up evidence. You'd get busted for that, and also be asked to hand over the real key.
You can go to jail in civil cases! You can get a felony from civil suits!
Have you done the GPG encrypted DVDR's? I was looking into doing the same thing for backups. I am curious how you shared the keys with your friends, and the speed of decryption.
Interesting. Those are the same specs someone else pointed out that is supplying this motherboard. Maybe the same company.
I tend to agree with you completely, although I think you'd also have to get the same BIOS.
By the way, the Berman Bill or its derivitive has not been passed yet.
If you needed to move the data, you'll just have to boot it up and start copying over your 100T line.
For instance, this would be useful if you had a 3TB home media center with about 15,000 mp3 albums, and a 1000 DIVX movies. (Just for instance)
This should not be on some network. It would be standalone, or a closed network if streaming to your tv system, etc.
If you wanted to share through the internet, then you need to be sending it encrypted. Either using Waste, on a private P2P network, or whatever. Even then you're not safe, because if the person you're sending it to is an RIAA spook, then it doesn't matter if your computer is in a fire-pit. You're busted. That is why I said it wasn't magic before.
If you got busted for sharing a 3 movies/albums on your private P2P Waste network, then you could get busted for 3 counts of copyright infringement. At least with this encryption, you wouldn't then be busted for having 16,000 counts of copyright infringement.
Maybe.
Would "pleading the 5th" work here?
Also, these cases are all about building evidence. If they're going to bust your door down to confiscate your computers to prove you have a 2 TB digital library, then it all starts with probably cause. They have probably cause that you have this in your home. They get a search warrant form the judge. They then bust in looking for it, find it and use it against you in the court of law (Criminal suit). However, if they don't find it (because everything you have is encrypted) then they don't have that evidence. Consider it flushing the cocaine down the toilet...no?
The key is on a type of USB keychain. Not in the motherboard. Not on the hard drive.
It was only encrypted with the key inside your keychain.
You'll have to buy the same type of motherboard, though.
If it is able to encrypt a harddrive at the beginning (with FDISK) with ANY key you have on that keychain, then I'm sure it is only used for superfast hardware encryption and decryption on the fly.
It will store the key in it's own RAM (that way you don't have to have the keychain plugged in after initial bootup) and will disappear when powered down.
Years ago on slashdot, when the first article talked about it, they were offering a free sample. Only had to pay for shipping. So I sent away from it, and much like the sea monkeys I got as a kid, these were great. Came with a plugin (with a small antenna) and a big remote (with lots of buttons--allowing you to remotely turn on and off many things--but you'd have to buy more).
Anyway, we use it on a very hard to reach lamp that is next to the bed. It's hard to reach, and hard to turn the knob on & off. We use the remote instead, and from our bed when we're done reading.
Anyway, got off topic, but this would be a great way to have an unobtrusive panic button handy
Nope. You have to click on the article, and click on the "Secur" picture. THere you will see that the drive connects to a daughter-card thingy, that also has a USB connection, and at the end is a USB keychain--which has your special key.