if the defendant can prove they did not have absolute control over their computer, perhaps the charges are null and void
I am not yet a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but I'd say there are two problems here. The first is that judges and juries don't understand technology the way we do, and all they will have to go on is expert witnesses, whom the prosecution would deliver as well as the defense. The second is that when the DA offers a deal, which they will given the desire for an easy conviction, the suspect have to ask himself if he wants to take a very big gamble.
In a more perfect world, plea bargaining wouldn't exist (nor be thought of as "necessary" by a system loaded with vice-crime offenses), our courts would allow scientific facts to be determined through inquisitorial "expert" judges rather than juries, and the FBI and law enforcement wouldn't be cooperating with self-confessed law breakers to catch innocent-until-proven-guilty suspects, who at worst are shown simply to possess an image of an act (not actually participated in the act) no more or less heinous than videotapes of the twin towers falling and killing 3,000 people. (i.e. the images themselves are just images, its the unprovable-without-confession arrousal that is the sick act.)
With all due respect to your well-thought-out-argument, if the DMCA prevents me from watching Erik the Viking in 2050, then it has finally done something good for once.;)
That the biggest UI change yet-to-come has to do with moving from a single-user desktop metaphor to a collaborative virtual space that leverages a lifetime of perception of the real world. When computers evolve into a more transparent role in our life, layering this digital world on our physical world will be next. It's coming sooner than we think, will we survive that long though?
A Nightmare in the Making -- end of M.A.D.
on
How to Become Invisible
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Stealth technology, whether invisibility to radar, visual light, or whatever, scares the crap out of me when combined with missle-intercept tech.
Mutual Assured Destruction has kept the nuclear powers-that-be in check for 60 years. A country that feels it has the technology to intercept incoming missles, and massively surprise its enemy (using stealth as discussed in this article),... well that country might just decide it has to strike first, before its enemy achieves similar capabilities and makes the same judgement call.
Think about it. Your military advisers tell you that 1) you can intercept incoming missles (even from subs), and 2) deliver missles without being detected. In essence, they are saying you could launch a preemptive nuclear strike with mostly political, not military, consequences.
You are also advised that in a few years your enemy will have sufficient tecnology to do the same.
Suddenly M.A.D. is out the window, and replaced with a "whomever strikes first wins" scenario.
Put three guys in a room (U.S., China, Russia) blindfolded. Tell them the first that leaves the room will live, and the rest will die, but if they all stay put, they will all live. Then tell them there is unlimited power for the first one out the door. What do you think will happen?
I am a college student in Washington DC where I study, eat, drink, and breath politics.
School is a good place for your optimism. I'm not trying to be snarky about that.
There are some means of corruption that are beyond even politicians, however.
History has shown otherwise, whether you are talking ancient history, or modern 20th century history of democracies. "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely" - Lord Acton. Nothing is beyond the politician, speaking generally. If you want to talk about a specific politician, or category, we could do that.
What if the fake flash card were discovered after the voting? This is not nearly sneaky enough.
What's a fake flashcard going to prove? The guilty could call it a "setup". Through the use of proxies, getting caught allows plausible deniability. Besides, getting caught in this particular case, especially with the older Diebold machines, would be highly unlikely.
Oh, and who controls the investigation into anyone caught? Typically the executive branch. And this particular federal executive branch has been caught red handed many times on important matters, but controlling the DOJ (and ultimately, pardons), means that they can't be punished effectively unless 50% of the house impeaches, and a super-majority of senators votes to convict. With those sorts of barriers to enforcement of the law, blind faith that politicians wouldn't balance the risk vs. reward of continued power vs. unlikely discovery... well, such faith is unwise at best.
Personally it seems like engineers testing the machine forgot to remove the testing interface.
You're kidding right? This is a piece of hardware, on a voting machine. That's not a mistake. It is at best (in my not-yet-a-lawyer-and-not-giving-legal-advice) opinion criminally negligent, and perhaps far worse.
I prefer the anti-Singularity hypothesis, which is that the technological change to get to the Singularity will eclipse our own ability to manage it ethically, and we'll blow the shit out of ourselves back into the stone age before we make any quantum leap of progress.
For evidence, I point you to the self-fulfilling apocolyptics who drool over the situation in the middle east.
I remember a time,... oh,... back in say the 80s... when this sort of scandal would be headlined on one of the big news networks. CBS, ABC, NBC. There would be a 4 minute investigative piece on the issue. People would get all stirred up. And maybe things would change.
Nowdays, the corporate cluster-hug that is America prevents this sort of scandal from rising above the level of a blog and a few email campaigns.
It seems like making these modifications would create security holes that could be exploited by those not associated with law enforcement.
Exactly! And with the recent revelation that the FBI can't even manage their own security, why should we be entrusting them with a backdoor to monitor all our communications?
Since this administration is so keen on the phrase, I'd go farther and say there is a national security risk with putting this system in place. If our government can access these wiretaps, there's good reason to believe that foreign intelligence agencies, organized crime, etc. would be able to as well. Once such groups have snapped up enough logins for online banking systems, they could create a flood of transactions that could bring our financial system to its knees, causing runs on banks, and all sorts of fun behavior that, with proper preperation, such criminals or spy-groups could use to their advantage.
So to prevent terrorism and crime we are going to surrender our privacy to terrorists and criminals? I call bullshit.
It's like you went to the criminals of the world and asked them: what's your wet dream? The answer would be this system.
A rumour is just a rumour, of course, but if anyone wasn't "reading tea leaves" and was passing this info on, then there is a very serious leak of inside information that could move markets. I am not a lawyer, but it's just this sort of crap that makes me think our markets are in need of some serious changes in the way information is spread.
I'd expect Apple to buy Sun first. Sun would be less expensive to buy, and would come with some crown jewels (Java, Solaris, Workstations) that would fit in nicely with Apple's platform and OS strategy.
Buying Nintendo wouldn't make any sense, as Apple has indicated litle desire to get involved in the games market.
Sun may have a few good reasons not to fully liberate Java at the moment.
First, Sun is ripe to be aquired. With the CEO-for-life gone, a reasonable market-valuation, and a set of "crown jewels" (Solaris, Java, fantastic server design), it's just a matter of time before someone (Apple?) sees the match and ponies up. Given that very likely possibility, why would Sun weaken its short-term value proposition for a buyer by giving up a certain amount of control over Java. (Not to mention putting a lot of cutting-edge VM code out there for competitors to leverage.) Java is a crown-jewel for aquisition; why give that up?
Second, Java is doing quite well without being fully open source, thank you. Go do searches on the job market. Java is still the hot ticket. It is a skill in demand because it holds a commanding share of server-side development; past, present, and through intertia, future. For any sysadmin, downloading and installing a Java VM is child's play. It's also free-as-in-beer. Yes, that isn't the same thing as fully free, but it's good enough for Java to be successful.
Third, Java has succeeded, in large part, due to a reasonably open, albeit slow, process known as the JCP. There's a level of quality, consistency, and prudentness to Java which has made it successful. We can argue day and night whether all the open-source developer's in the world tweaking Java outside of Sun's stewardship would be more or less successful. What matters, for Sun, is that the current process is successful. Change from that course must be accomplished in steps to verify Sun isn't heading in the wrong direction, for its bottom line.
I should add that as a developer, I'd love to see Java be FOSS; GPLed or BSDed or whatever. Consider, for a moment, that Sun is a public company, and you'll see why Sun has done more to open-source their flagships than, say, Oracle or Microsoft. Or IBM for that matter (AIX, mainframe-OSes, DB2, Lotus apps, Websphere, Rational apps, MQ...)
Apologies in advance that the article is mainly about the media's misinterpretation of Sun's move, but in my opinion, Java licensed in a way that promotes its distribution as part of Linux flavors is still newsworthy, and Sun has taken yet another big step.
Your comment is funny, but I have to speak up personally here as it concerns me this particular epidemic is not being taken seriously.
My mother, now in her mid 50s, has been suffering from something precisely like this. I say "something", because she has received absolutely no help to date from the medical community. Dermatologists tell her it is all in her head, and it has made her life completely miserable. Just looking the scarring all over her face, I find it a violation of the hypocratic oath that she is told it is all in her head. She's had it three years and is a teacher (which along with nurses is the #1 group that has this).
I know we all want to think this is just a joke, but consider this your two degrees of seperation from a sufferer.
What's worse is that the CDC is pulling a Katrina with this one and just waving their hands, hoping it will leave them alone.
It would seem to me that the future of kernel design has to take into account that we are shifting from advances in clock-rate to the parallelization of multi-core CPUs. I realize that parallel processing has existed for decades, particularly at the high end of hardware, but I'm talking about the average personal computer and multiple cores on a single chip.
I'm curious to the kernel hackers out there whether a 100-core CPU will see an advantage in either the micro-kernel vs. monolithic approach?
Also, I'm curious if more portions of a micro-kernel/message-passing could be implemented somehow in hardware or in a programmable gate array to try to kill the speed issue?
One big step Apple should take in securing OS-X is using Mandatory Access Controls, ala SELinux. SEDarwin is a step in the right direction, and hopefully Apple is taking notice.
I'd love to see the next iteration of OS-X deliver: 1. A standard framework for Mandatory Access Controls 2. A firewall configurable to prompt the user to whitelist the behavior of new applications 3. Clearer encouragement to run as a non-administrator account 4. A virusscanning framework, without necessarily commiting to providing the signatures 5. Use of the virtualization technology built into the CPUs of the Intel macs to more strongly isolate applications
I'd rather see Apple, not McAfee, add this value to the platform. The above features are what an Operating System should provide, in my opinion... not what a third-party vendor should tack on.
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I am not yet a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but I'd say there are two problems here. The first is that judges and juries don't understand technology the way we do, and all they will have to go on is expert witnesses, whom the prosecution would deliver as well as the defense. The second is that when the DA offers a deal, which they will given the desire for an easy conviction, the suspect have to ask himself if he wants to take a very big gamble.
In a more perfect world, plea bargaining wouldn't exist (nor be thought of as "necessary" by a system loaded with vice-crime offenses), our courts would allow scientific facts to be determined through inquisitorial "expert" judges rather than juries, and the FBI and law enforcement wouldn't be cooperating with self-confessed law breakers to catch innocent-until-proven-guilty suspects, who at worst are shown simply to possess an image of an act (not actually participated in the act) no more or less heinous than videotapes of the twin towers falling and killing 3,000 people. (i.e. the images themselves are just images, its the unprovable-without-confession arrousal that is the sick act.)
Anyways, G-d Save the Constitution.
Thanks for the recommendation! Much appreciated.
... hate our freedoms?
With all due respect to your well-thought-out-argument, if the DMCA prevents me from watching Erik the Viking in 2050, then it has finally done something good for once. ;)
That the biggest UI change yet-to-come has to do with moving from a single-user desktop metaphor to a collaborative virtual space that leverages a lifetime of perception of the real world. When computers evolve into a more transparent role in our life, layering this digital world on our physical world will be next. It's coming sooner than we think, will we survive that long though?
Mutual Assured Destruction has kept the nuclear powers-that-be in check for 60 years. A country that feels it has the technology to intercept incoming missles, and massively surprise its enemy (using stealth as discussed in this article), ... well that country might just decide it has to strike first, before its enemy achieves similar capabilities and makes the same judgement call.
Think about it. Your military advisers tell you that 1) you can intercept incoming missles (even from subs), and 2) deliver missles without being detected. In essence, they are saying you could launch a preemptive nuclear strike with mostly political, not military, consequences.
You are also advised that in a few years your enemy will have sufficient tecnology to do the same.
Suddenly M.A.D. is out the window, and replaced with a "whomever strikes first wins" scenario.
Put three guys in a room (U.S., China, Russia) blindfolded. Tell them the first that leaves the room will live, and the rest will die, but if they all stay put, they will all live. Then tell them there is unlimited power for the first one out the door. What do you think will happen?
School is a good place for your optimism. I'm not trying to be snarky about that.
There are some means of corruption that are beyond even politicians, however.
History has shown otherwise, whether you are talking ancient history, or modern 20th century history of democracies. "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely" - Lord Acton. Nothing is beyond the politician, speaking generally. If you want to talk about a specific politician, or category, we could do that.
What if the fake flash card were discovered after the voting? This is not nearly sneaky enough.
What's a fake flashcard going to prove? The guilty could call it a "setup". Through the use of proxies, getting caught allows plausible deniability. Besides, getting caught in this particular case, especially with the older Diebold machines, would be highly unlikely.
Oh, and who controls the investigation into anyone caught? Typically the executive branch. And this particular federal executive branch has been caught red handed many times on important matters, but controlling the DOJ (and ultimately, pardons), means that they can't be punished effectively unless 50% of the house impeaches, and a super-majority of senators votes to convict. With those sorts of barriers to enforcement of the law, blind faith that politicians wouldn't balance the risk vs. reward of continued power vs. unlikely discovery ... well, such faith is unwise at best.
Personally it seems like engineers testing the machine forgot to remove the testing interface.
You're kidding right? This is a piece of hardware, on a voting machine. That's not a mistake. It is at best (in my not-yet-a-lawyer-and-not-giving-legal-advice) opinion criminally negligent, and perhaps far worse.
Welcome to politics; you're new here, aren't you?
Considering not one bit of either his original story, nor this story, is verifiable to third parties, I think you'll be having a dinner by yourself.
I prefer the anti-Singularity hypothesis, which is that the technological change to get to the Singularity will eclipse our own ability to manage it ethically, and we'll blow the shit out of ourselves back into the stone age before we make any quantum leap of progress.
For evidence, I point you to the self-fulfilling apocolyptics who drool over the situation in the middle east.
I remember a time, ... oh, ... back in say the 80s... when this sort of scandal would be headlined on one of the big news networks. CBS, ABC, NBC. There would be a 4 minute investigative piece on the issue. People would get all stirred up. And maybe things would change.
Nowdays, the corporate cluster-hug that is America prevents this sort of scandal from rising above the level of a blog and a few email campaigns.
We're totally screwed.
Exactly! And with the recent revelation that the FBI can't even manage their own security, why should we be entrusting them with a backdoor to monitor all our communications?
Since this administration is so keen on the phrase, I'd go farther and say there is a national security risk with putting this system in place. If our government can access these wiretaps, there's good reason to believe that foreign intelligence agencies, organized crime, etc. would be able to as well. Once such groups have snapped up enough logins for online banking systems, they could create a flood of transactions that could bring our financial system to its knees, causing runs on banks, and all sorts of fun behavior that, with proper preperation, such criminals or spy-groups could use to their advantage.
So to prevent terrorism and crime we are going to surrender our privacy to terrorists and criminals? I call bullshit.
It's like you went to the criminals of the world and asked them: what's your wet dream? The answer would be this system.
Will this protect his estate from civil cases, I wonder.
If so, it would inspire suicide intended to clear one's name, and protect one's $$$ from being taken from offspring.
Letsee... 1.5 years @ $2.51 million a day....
That's the sort of coin that Bill Gates finds in his sofa.
... to figure out which politicians in Massachusetts are for sale.
Imagine the interesting content and rulesets that could be created by people not bound by the revenue-focus of Sony.
Every day there's a new bill or sneaky ammendment trying to deliver a payload of graft into our congressional agenda.
I just can't keep up any more.
Would somebody please write an application to keep up with this crap for me automatically?
Apple could do it and call it "iCantFuckingBelieveTheseCrooks".
A rumour is just a rumour, of course, but if anyone wasn't "reading tea leaves" and was passing this info on, then there is a very serious leak of inside information that could move markets. I am not a lawyer, but it's just this sort of crap that makes me think our markets are in need of some serious changes in the way information is spread.
I'd expect Apple to buy Sun first. Sun would be less expensive to buy, and would come with some crown jewels (Java, Solaris, Workstations) that would fit in nicely with Apple's platform and OS strategy.
Buying Nintendo wouldn't make any sense, as Apple has indicated litle desire to get involved in the games market.
Sun may have a few good reasons not to fully liberate Java at the moment.
First, Sun is ripe to be aquired. With the CEO-for-life gone, a reasonable market-valuation, and a set of "crown jewels" (Solaris, Java, fantastic server design), it's just a matter of time before someone (Apple?) sees the match and ponies up. Given that very likely possibility, why would Sun weaken its short-term value proposition for a buyer by giving up a certain amount of control over Java. (Not to mention putting a lot of cutting-edge VM code out there for competitors to leverage.) Java is a crown-jewel for aquisition; why give that up?
Second, Java is doing quite well without being fully open source, thank you. Go do searches on the job market. Java is still the hot ticket. It is a skill in demand because it holds a commanding share of server-side development; past, present, and through intertia, future. For any sysadmin, downloading and installing a Java VM is child's play. It's also free-as-in-beer. Yes, that isn't the same thing as fully free, but it's good enough for Java to be successful.
Third, Java has succeeded, in large part, due to a reasonably open, albeit slow, process known as the JCP. There's a level of quality, consistency, and prudentness to Java which has made it successful. We can argue day and night whether all the open-source developer's in the world tweaking Java outside of Sun's stewardship would be more or less successful. What matters, for Sun, is that the current process is successful. Change from that course must be accomplished in steps to verify Sun isn't heading in the wrong direction, for its bottom line.
I should add that as a developer, I'd love to see Java be FOSS; GPLed or BSDed or whatever. Consider, for a moment, that Sun is a public company, and you'll see why Sun has done more to open-source their flagships than, say, Oracle or Microsoft. Or IBM for that matter (AIX, mainframe-OSes, DB2, Lotus apps, Websphere, Rational apps, MQ...)
Apologies in advance that the article is mainly about the media's misinterpretation of Sun's move, but in my opinion, Java licensed in a way that promotes its distribution as part of Linux flavors is still newsworthy, and Sun has taken yet another big step.
... for the cost of the Iraq war.
Your comment is funny, but I have to speak up personally here as it concerns me this particular epidemic is not being taken seriously.
My mother, now in her mid 50s, has been suffering from something precisely like this. I say "something", because she has received absolutely no help to date from the medical community. Dermatologists tell her it is all in her head, and it has made her life completely miserable. Just looking the scarring all over her face, I find it a violation of the hypocratic oath that she is told it is all in her head. She's had it three years and is a teacher (which along with nurses is the #1 group that has this).
I know we all want to think this is just a joke, but consider this your two degrees of seperation from a sufferer.
What's worse is that the CDC is pulling a Katrina with this one and just waving their hands, hoping it will leave them alone.
This just in:
People willing to participate in a phone poll do not care about their privacy.
Film at 11.
It would seem to me that the future of kernel design has to take into account that we are shifting from advances in clock-rate to the parallelization of multi-core CPUs. I realize that parallel processing has existed for decades, particularly at the high end of hardware, but I'm talking about the average personal computer and multiple cores on a single chip.
I'm curious to the kernel hackers out there whether a 100-core CPU will see an advantage in either the micro-kernel vs. monolithic approach?
Also, I'm curious if more portions of a micro-kernel/message-passing could be implemented somehow in hardware or in a programmable gate array to try to kill the speed issue?
One big step Apple should take in securing OS-X is using Mandatory Access Controls, ala SELinux. SEDarwin is a step in the right direction, and hopefully Apple is taking notice.
... not what a third-party vendor should tack on.
I'd love to see the next iteration of OS-X deliver:
1. A standard framework for Mandatory Access Controls
2. A firewall configurable to prompt the user to whitelist the behavior of new applications
3. Clearer encouragement to run as a non-administrator account
4. A virusscanning framework, without necessarily commiting to providing the signatures
5. Use of the virtualization technology built into the CPUs of the Intel macs to more strongly isolate applications
I'd rather see Apple, not McAfee, add this value to the platform. The above features are what an Operating System should provide, in my opinion