For other than small planes, you get type rated (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating [wikipedia.org]) by someone who's more experienced in that type of aircraft.
How does that work with a new plane that nobody's type rated for yet (eg. the Airbus A380 was only relatively recently released)?
If it's not specifically authorized in the Constitution, it's not legitimate authority. Generalized surveillance is prohibited by the 4th amendment, no matter how many representatives or judges have oversight. Congressional oversight of an unconstitutional law does not make that law legitimate, it makes those congress people traitors to their oath to defend the Constitution. The only way to make this legal is to amend the Constitution.
Most other first world countries have similar legal guarantees. The important point is those guarantees only apply to their own citizens.
It appears that they've been working around this in a very simple manner: GCHQ (in the UK) spy on US citizens and pass this information back to the US. All of a sudden, it's not the US doing the spying so that's all right.
The same thing is done in reverse by the NSA.
If this isn't a fairly transparent cynical ploy to work around legal protection in such a fashion as to guarantee that it would take years to sort out in court, I don't know what is.
It's incredibly (or intentionally?) botched PR. Why is the NSA still in the spotlight (or at least light) instead of slipping back into the shadows?
Because the rhetoric is no longer "The government's power must be kept in strict check and if a branch of government is going to far, it must be stopped". It hasn't been that for some time; today the rhetoric is "Think of the child^W terrorists!".
On the contrary, it's an excellent reason. From their point of view, though maybe not yours.
Microsoft have a problem. It's a problem caused mostly by their own lax attitude to OEMs - Windows has a pretty horrific reputation and Microsoft's reputation is pretty well synonymous with Widnows'. The only reason it maintains its stranglehold is a combination of people not knowing it's possible to use something else and when they do know, being constrained by business software that's Windows only. The way Linux is heading right now, there's a very good chance both of those may cease to be an issue within 5 years.
A large part of that reputation is due to OEMs breaking a perfectly good OS to slap on their own bits. Every version of Windows I've ever seen is frankly a lot better if you use a stock build rather than the futzed-around bastardisation that is "Windows plus whatever crap HP/Lenovo/Dell decided to slap on as an extra this month".
Now, companies like Microsoft don't make huge changes to contracts overnight. But I've noticed a pattern emerging where manufacturers use "includes a standard install of Windows without a whole lot of extra shite" as a selling point on some lines - I'll put money on it that Microsoft are pushing this and would like a universe where every PC ships this way. Maybe five years from now, OEM contracts will enforce exactly this.
Very possibly, but the problem is that while Hitler was a rabid loony dictator, he was also a popular rabid loony dictator.
Germany was pretty much completely buggered after the First World War; a lot of Hitler's policies (once you gloss over the holocaust; I can't believe I just typed that) were dedicated to fixing the problems Germany faced. By and large they were very effective.
Now, immediately post-WW2 Germany's economy was looking pretty dicey. Which means we had in the middle of Europe a once-powerful nation almost completely destroyed by war and an economy that could very easily collapse at short notice - hey, where have we seen one of those before? But with one crucial difference - hindsight. We now knew that this was the perfect recipe for extremism.
I'm not an expert by any means, but I imagine those laws were passed so as to effectively prevent those who would reform the National Socialist Workers Party from whitewashing history.
In my experience its not the questions or the answers (unless complete wrong). I look at their demeanor.
I've done exactly this and while I think it's probably a better way to hire good staff, I've been told that it's a bad idea from an HR perspective.
Apparently they like a nice simple list of questions with model answers, and a hiring decision based purely on how close the answers given are to the model. This is nothing to do with ensuring you get good staff; it's so the people you reject can't claim they've somehow been discriminated against.
Oddly, those same HR people are remarkably bad at answering the simple question "Okay. So how exactly do I write your list of questions and answers in order to ensure that your method is as good as mine for filtering out bad hires?"
Because (while no HR department or team manager will ever admit it in a public forum) we as a civilisation have precisely zero idea how to hire decent staff.
Oh, we'd love to pretend we do. We come up with all sorts of wonderful ideas like technical interviews (what the hell is a technical interview and how should it be structured anyway? I've never yet been given any training on that, yet I've had to devise them on a few occasions - I usually went for questions that demonstrate the candidate is trying to think through the problem in a methodical way rather than just guessing or reciting answers they've memorised), brainteasers, psychological evaluations - yet I'm quite sure we'd get just as good results on average just pulling names out of a hat.
Look at it this way: if you commit to using Tor, in essence the NSA has a choice.
1. Shrug their collective shoulders, say, "Oh well. No point in bothering with anyone using Tor." and move on to easier targets.
2. Say to themselves "Right, Mr. Clever Who Thinks He Can Hide So Easily. We'll see about that..." and redouble their efforts.
When the organisation in question is a government spy agency with a budget that might as well be unlimited for all practical purposes and a battalion of very clever people who are employed wholly and exclusively to figure out new and inventive ways to spy on people - what did you think they were going to do?
It's not sudden; it's been the seller's responsibility since more-or-less forever.
Here's the thing though - and I'm using the UK as an example seeing as I live in the UK.
Virtually no retailers - certainly none of the major chains - will honour anything beyond the first 12 months without a fight, and most people know very little about their consumer rights so accept this. Sometimes they won't even honour the manufacturer's warranty, instead pushing the customer to deal directly to the manufacturer.
I don't think this is a case of a few bad apples; I think it's a case of training from head office clearly stating "This is our aftersales policy. Follow it or be fired."
Which means that Apple stating clearly on their website "You've got six years to take it up with your retailer" is going to go down like a lead balloon with a lot of retailers.
Thing is, this guy knows what the NSA is capable of. I wouldn't be too surprised if he outed himself precisely because the alternative is to mysteriously commit suicide a couple of months from now.
Note that it does not receive broadcast TV. It does, however, hook directly into iTunes so you can buy or rent TV shows.
It does not have much in the way of onboard storage - enough for an OS and that's about it. It streams whatever you want to watch from either other systems on your home network or the Internet.
It has one video output - HDMI. Which, I'm sure you know, provides encryption.
It can also playback files you have in an existing collection, but that's a relatively small part of the package. It'd be trivial for a firmware update to remove this functionality.
Oh, it's a gorgeous small box. Tiny thing. And the UI is a joy compared to virtually every other set top box I've ever seen. But it's pretty much exactly what you're describing and it's available to buy today.
That's what puzzles me about the move: If Google said '95% of 3rd party XMPP servers are spam bots, we aren't doing federation unless you are a Google Apps customer or otherwise verifiably unlikely to do something dramatically stupid', that'd be annoying but not wildly surprising. Dropping XMPP entirely, though, both kills 3rd-party clients and suggests that they were either unable to shoehorn what they wanted into XMPP(even as a proprietary extension, with the standardized subset allowing partial compatibility), or they saw breaking compatibility as a virtue.
Google have always been pretty ruthless about culling services that aren't getting enough traction, but in the last year I think it's been more visible - and rather than being just services that few people are using (Wave), it's been targeted at services that can be somehow monetised or otherwise made directly relevant to the business.
Off the top of my head:
- There's no longer a free Google Apps for Domains tier. Existing domains have been allowed to stay but nobody new can register for free.
- Those who are still on the Free tier have had ActiveSync turned off. Works for existing devices, will break when you try and set up a new one.
- CalDAV is in the process of being discontinued. Quite what this will mean for iPhone owners is anyone's guess - it still works at this stage but I wouldn't be too surprised if Google are using this behind closed doors as a bargaining chip with Apple: "You want all your iPhone users to be able to sync their devices with Google? Well, I guess you'd better stop suing all the Android handset manufacturers."
We hear and see stories about bitter company rivals.
You'd be surprised. Very often, two companies that you'd think compete are actually aiming at subtly different customers and can achieve more by working together.
DRM doesn't effectively control reproduction. It never has. Everything that is released on blu-ray is torrented immediately.
Depends on your definition of "effectively control reproduction".
If you mean "effectively control reproduction forever" - you're absolutely right.
However, it has never been intended to achieve that. What it's intended to achieve is twofold:
- Control reproduction sufficiently that a significant proportion of the market will say "Meh - too difficult. I'll just buy it".
- Control reproduction for long enough that anyone who wants the product badly enough to get hold of a copy in the first couple of weeks post-release will have no choice but to buy a legitimate copy.
I'm generalising hugely here, but as a profession, most IT people (whether it's in software engineering, systems administration or management) can be extremely dismissive of sales and marketing.
This is a huge mistake.
If you're selling a commodity (a commodity is something where the product from one company is much the same as the same product from another company - gold, copper, coal and bananas would be examples of commodity items) - you've got to persuade people that it's somehow worth buying from you rather than any of the other people selling essentially the same damn thing. And commodities tend to have very slim profit margins because as soon as you find a way to knock £0.02 off your costs and pass that saving onto your customers, your competitors do the same thing. There is a damn good reason that every major supermarket has an enormous advertising budget, and it ain't because they like throwing money at newspapers and television stations.
If you're selling something that isn't a commodity and never will be - there's lots of business mentor-type folk who wouldn't get out of bed for less than £1000 per day, even out in the sticks - you need to persuade customers that you really are worth £1000 per day. If your customers get the remotest inkling of an idea that you're not worth that sort of money, you'll be out of a job very quickly indeed.
Then you have things that aren't really a commodity, but your customers think they are. A hell of a lot of technology falls into this category. You're trying to persuade your customer they should be buying software that lets them do X, Y and Z - but they've seen a boxed product in their local branch of PC World that claims to do the exact same thing for a tenth the price. If you can come up with a quick, easy way to resolve this that doesn't involve learning an awful lot of sales theory that doesn't always work - there is an entire industry that will happily write out 6-figure cheques to you.
Biscuits (cookies in US parlance) are VAT free unless they are covered in chocolate. If they're covered in chocolate, they're a luxury item and therefore VAT'able.
Jaffa Cakes are small cakes. So small, in fact, that they are the shape and size of a biscuit. They're covered in chocolate and sold in packs of about 20-odd in the same aisle as the biscuits for about the same price. They're not VAT-able because they are classed as a cake.
Google could easily offer you GPG for its webmail, while still passing all your information on to the government, including the plaintext of your 'encrypted' emails. Seriously, do you even know how public-key encryption works?
Only if your private key was stored on their servers could Google do this.
It's a relatively recent innovation, but ISTR reading of a few JavaScript implementations of public-key cryptography, which would open the door to GPG-encrypted webmail without having to put your private key on a third-party provider's server.
Hacking into gmail is considered a crime in the US (even if it's done by an allied country).
He said "get in", not "hack in".
There is a process known as "lawful interception", and it's existed for the telephone network for decades - it's a term that covers the legal and technical framework that allows government to intercept phone calls. Something similar exists in most countries worldwide.
In short, in most countries the government can demand that local telcos assist in tapping telephone conversations. There may be various bits of legal paperwork that need to be filled in first, but the upshot's the same - the telephone company cannot say "No" to a properly submitted demand.
I know nothing about Israeli law, but I would not be surprised if Israel had extended something similar to email communications.
Google have an office in Tel Aviv, so Google can't turn around and say "We're an American company; you can stuff your lawful intercept request".
Slashdot Mirror
For other than small planes, you get type rated (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rating [wikipedia.org]) by someone who's more experienced in that type of aircraft.
How does that work with a new plane that nobody's type rated for yet (eg. the Airbus A380 was only relatively recently released)?
But why? Training error? Instrument error? How the hell did this pilot ever get out of flight school error?
If it's not specifically authorized in the Constitution, it's not legitimate authority. Generalized surveillance is prohibited by the 4th amendment, no matter how many representatives or judges have oversight. Congressional oversight of an unconstitutional law does not make that law legitimate, it makes those congress people traitors to their oath to defend the Constitution. The only way to make this legal is to amend the Constitution.
Most other first world countries have similar legal guarantees. The important point is those guarantees only apply to their own citizens.
It appears that they've been working around this in a very simple manner: GCHQ (in the UK) spy on US citizens and pass this information back to the US. All of a sudden, it's not the US doing the spying so that's all right.
The same thing is done in reverse by the NSA.
If this isn't a fairly transparent cynical ploy to work around legal protection in such a fashion as to guarantee that it would take years to sort out in court, I don't know what is.
It's incredibly (or intentionally?) botched PR. Why is the NSA still in the spotlight (or at least light) instead of slipping back into the shadows?
Because the rhetoric is no longer "The government's power must be kept in strict check and if a branch of government is going to far, it must be stopped". It hasn't been that for some time; today the rhetoric is "Think of the child^W terrorists!".
That is not a very good reason.
On the contrary, it's an excellent reason. From their point of view, though maybe not yours.
Microsoft have a problem. It's a problem caused mostly by their own lax attitude to OEMs - Windows has a pretty horrific reputation and Microsoft's reputation is pretty well synonymous with Widnows'. The only reason it maintains its stranglehold is a combination of people not knowing it's possible to use something else and when they do know, being constrained by business software that's Windows only. The way Linux is heading right now, there's a very good chance both of those may cease to be an issue within 5 years.
A large part of that reputation is due to OEMs breaking a perfectly good OS to slap on their own bits. Every version of Windows I've ever seen is frankly a lot better if you use a stock build rather than the futzed-around bastardisation that is "Windows plus whatever crap HP/Lenovo/Dell decided to slap on as an extra this month".
Now, companies like Microsoft don't make huge changes to contracts overnight. But I've noticed a pattern emerging where manufacturers use "includes a standard install of Windows without a whole lot of extra shite" as a selling point on some lines - I'll put money on it that Microsoft are pushing this and would like a universe where every PC ships this way. Maybe five years from now, OEM contracts will enforce exactly this.
Not exactly obvious though, is it? Where's the graphical hint to tell you "You can type in here"?
Very possibly, but the problem is that while Hitler was a rabid loony dictator, he was also a popular rabid loony dictator.
Germany was pretty much completely buggered after the First World War; a lot of Hitler's policies (once you gloss over the holocaust; I can't believe I just typed that) were dedicated to fixing the problems Germany faced. By and large they were very effective.
Now, immediately post-WW2 Germany's economy was looking pretty dicey. Which means we had in the middle of Europe a once-powerful nation almost completely destroyed by war and an economy that could very easily collapse at short notice - hey, where have we seen one of those before? But with one crucial difference - hindsight. We now knew that this was the perfect recipe for extremism.
I'm not an expert by any means, but I imagine those laws were passed so as to effectively prevent those who would reform the National Socialist Workers Party from whitewashing history.
In my experience its not the questions or the answers (unless complete wrong). I look at their demeanor.
I've done exactly this and while I think it's probably a better way to hire good staff, I've been told that it's a bad idea from an HR perspective.
Apparently they like a nice simple list of questions with model answers, and a hiring decision based purely on how close the answers given are to the model. This is nothing to do with ensuring you get good staff; it's so the people you reject can't claim they've somehow been discriminated against.
Oddly, those same HR people are remarkably bad at answering the simple question "Okay. So how exactly do I write your list of questions and answers in order to ensure that your method is as good as mine for filtering out bad hires?"
Because (while no HR department or team manager will ever admit it in a public forum) we as a civilisation have precisely zero idea how to hire decent staff.
Oh, we'd love to pretend we do. We come up with all sorts of wonderful ideas like technical interviews (what the hell is a technical interview and how should it be structured anyway? I've never yet been given any training on that, yet I've had to devise them on a few occasions - I usually went for questions that demonstrate the candidate is trying to think through the problem in a methodical way rather than just guessing or reciting answers they've memorised), brainteasers, psychological evaluations - yet I'm quite sure we'd get just as good results on average just pulling names out of a hat.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise.
Look at it this way: if you commit to using Tor, in essence the NSA has a choice.
1. Shrug their collective shoulders, say, "Oh well. No point in bothering with anyone using Tor." and move on to easier targets.
2. Say to themselves "Right, Mr. Clever Who Thinks He Can Hide So Easily. We'll see about that..." and redouble their efforts.
When the organisation in question is a government spy agency with a budget that might as well be unlimited for all practical purposes and a battalion of very clever people who are employed wholly and exclusively to figure out new and inventive ways to spy on people - what did you think they were going to do?
Disagree. The correct response is:
With regards to your recent letter, we refer you to the reply given in the case Arkell v. Pressdram.
It's not sudden; it's been the seller's responsibility since more-or-less forever.
Here's the thing though - and I'm using the UK as an example seeing as I live in the UK.
Virtually no retailers - certainly none of the major chains - will honour anything beyond the first 12 months without a fight, and most people know very little about their consumer rights so accept this. Sometimes they won't even honour the manufacturer's warranty, instead pushing the customer to deal directly to the manufacturer.
I don't think this is a case of a few bad apples; I think it's a case of training from head office clearly stating "This is our aftersales policy. Follow it or be fired."
Which means that Apple stating clearly on their website "You've got six years to take it up with your retailer" is going to go down like a lead balloon with a lot of retailers.
The keyword here is "Back in the days".
Precisely nobody wishes to go back to those days.
Thing is, this guy knows what the NSA is capable of. I wouldn't be too surprised if he outed himself precisely because the alternative is to mysteriously commit suicide a couple of months from now.
Not completely there yet?
Take a look at the Apple TV.
Note that it does not receive broadcast TV. It does, however, hook directly into iTunes so you can buy or rent TV shows.
It does not have much in the way of onboard storage - enough for an OS and that's about it. It streams whatever you want to watch from either other systems on your home network or the Internet.
It has one video output - HDMI. Which, I'm sure you know, provides encryption.
It can also playback files you have in an existing collection, but that's a relatively small part of the package. It'd be trivial for a firmware update to remove this functionality.
Oh, it's a gorgeous small box. Tiny thing. And the UI is a joy compared to virtually every other set top box I've ever seen. But it's pretty much exactly what you're describing and it's available to buy today.
That's what puzzles me about the move: If Google said '95% of 3rd party XMPP servers are spam bots, we aren't doing federation unless you are a Google Apps customer or otherwise verifiably unlikely to do something dramatically stupid', that'd be annoying but not wildly surprising. Dropping XMPP entirely, though, both kills 3rd-party clients and suggests that they were either unable to shoehorn what they wanted into XMPP(even as a proprietary extension, with the standardized subset allowing partial compatibility), or they saw breaking compatibility as a virtue.
Google have always been pretty ruthless about culling services that aren't getting enough traction, but in the last year I think it's been more visible - and rather than being just services that few people are using (Wave), it's been targeted at services that can be somehow monetised or otherwise made directly relevant to the business.
Off the top of my head:
- There's no longer a free Google Apps for Domains tier. Existing domains have been allowed to stay but nobody new can register for free.
- Those who are still on the Free tier have had ActiveSync turned off. Works for existing devices, will break when you try and set up a new one.
- CalDAV is in the process of being discontinued. Quite what this will mean for iPhone owners is anyone's guess - it still works at this stage but I wouldn't be too surprised if Google are using this behind closed doors as a bargaining chip with Apple: "You want all your iPhone users to be able to sync their devices with Google? Well, I guess you'd better stop suing all the Android handset manufacturers."
We hear and see stories about bitter company rivals.
You'd be surprised. Very often, two companies that you'd think compete are actually aiming at subtly different customers and can achieve more by working together.
Doesn't need to be a back door - forensics products to crack phones already exist:
http://www.msab.com/app-data/downloads/Release_Notes_(English)/XRY_release_notes_6.5_EN.pdf
DRM doesn't effectively control reproduction. It never has. Everything that is released on blu-ray is torrented immediately.
Depends on your definition of "effectively control reproduction".
If you mean "effectively control reproduction forever" - you're absolutely right.
However, it has never been intended to achieve that. What it's intended to achieve is twofold:
- Control reproduction sufficiently that a significant proportion of the market will say "Meh - too difficult. I'll just buy it".
- Control reproduction for long enough that anyone who wants the product badly enough to get hold of a copy in the first couple of weeks post-release will have no choice but to buy a legitimate copy.
Those that could convert to IPv6 would do so, freeing up IPv4 space for those that could not.
BT provide routers to their customers; I imagine the great majority are still on the BT-provided router.
AFAIK, BT have yet to provide an IPv6-capable router.
since it would require massive and detectable changes to local telco infrastructure.
What makes you say that?
Virtually every country in the civilised world already has a requirement for telcos to support lawful intercept.
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes, you are.
I'm generalising hugely here, but as a profession, most IT people (whether it's in software engineering, systems administration or management) can be extremely dismissive of sales and marketing.
This is a huge mistake.
If you're selling a commodity (a commodity is something where the product from one company is much the same as the same product from another company - gold, copper, coal and bananas would be examples of commodity items) - you've got to persuade people that it's somehow worth buying from you rather than any of the other people selling essentially the same damn thing. And commodities tend to have very slim profit margins because as soon as you find a way to knock £0.02 off your costs and pass that saving onto your customers, your competitors do the same thing. There is a damn good reason that every major supermarket has an enormous advertising budget, and it ain't because they like throwing money at newspapers and television stations.
If you're selling something that isn't a commodity and never will be - there's lots of business mentor-type folk who wouldn't get out of bed for less than £1000 per day, even out in the sticks - you need to persuade customers that you really are worth £1000 per day. If your customers get the remotest inkling of an idea that you're not worth that sort of money, you'll be out of a job very quickly indeed.
Then you have things that aren't really a commodity, but your customers think they are. A hell of a lot of technology falls into this category. You're trying to persuade your customer they should be buying software that lets them do X, Y and Z - but they've seen a boxed product in their local branch of PC World that claims to do the exact same thing for a tenth the price. If you can come up with a quick, easy way to resolve this that doesn't involve learning an awful lot of sales theory that doesn't always work - there is an entire industry that will happily write out 6-figure cheques to you.
It's even worse than that. Cakes are VAT free.
Biscuits (cookies in US parlance) are VAT free unless they are covered in chocolate. If they're covered in chocolate, they're a luxury item and therefore VAT'able.
Jaffa Cakes are small cakes. So small, in fact, that they are the shape and size of a biscuit. They're covered in chocolate and sold in packs of about 20-odd in the same aisle as the biscuits for about the same price. They're not VAT-able because they are classed as a cake.
Google could easily offer you GPG for its webmail, while still passing all your information on to the government, including the plaintext of your 'encrypted' emails. Seriously, do you even know how public-key encryption works?
Only if your private key was stored on their servers could Google do this.
It's a relatively recent innovation, but ISTR reading of a few JavaScript implementations of public-key cryptography, which would open the door to GPG-encrypted webmail without having to put your private key on a third-party provider's server.
Hacking into gmail is considered a crime in the US (even if it's done by an allied country).
He said "get in", not "hack in".
There is a process known as "lawful interception", and it's existed for the telephone network for decades - it's a term that covers the legal and technical framework that allows government to intercept phone calls. Something similar exists in most countries worldwide.
In short, in most countries the government can demand that local telcos assist in tapping telephone conversations. There may be various bits of legal paperwork that need to be filled in first, but the upshot's the same - the telephone company cannot say "No" to a properly submitted demand.
I know nothing about Israeli law, but I would not be surprised if Israel had extended something similar to email communications.
Google have an office in Tel Aviv, so Google can't turn around and say "We're an American company; you can stuff your lawful intercept request".