The provisions of "you must provide copyright filters on any upload site" seem tailor made to restrict content uploaded to Wikileaks. That's something to keep in mind, if such laws are universal throughout the UK and make no clear accomodations for journalism.
Excuse me, but why are you posting that in response to _my_ message? I was trying to point out that Apple's encrypted client data is not the only data they have. Even with the client's data robustly encrypted, without master keys, that there is other client data Apple _would_ have available and unencrypted to their own billing departments and account management.
I I may also point out, "dirty" editing is not the same as careless or sloppy editing, or a failure to verify stories. All of them are troubling, but they're distinct issues.
The ownership and transfers of ownership of the phone, itself, would exist in Apple's customer records. So would customer information in their iTunes store, such as the date of purchases. That is not the same thing as copies of the data _on_ an Apple manufactured device, such as an iPhone. But along with Apple's customer tracking data, it's potentially quite useful for reporting customer location during the time of a crime under investigation.
Certainly, rehabilitation is not their _only_ mandate. But they are certainly judged and fiscally rewarded for it. And prison staff often, even normally, develop some emotional relationships with their inmates. It can be abusive, but these relationships can also be therapeutic, even becoming a sense of community or a sense of family.
> argues layer after layer after layer that humanity has systematically overvalued the punitive signal for behaviour modification
There is a significant behavior between this and idea that punishment does not work. That punishment can be, and has been, overused in some circumstances is not in question. There are numerous papers, such as this one from the American Psychiatric Association, http://www.apa.org/news/press/.... There is also this publication from the National Institute of Justice on the effectiveness of punishment as deterrence, https://nij.gov/five-things/pa... .
If I might say, the NIJ publication is particularly interesting. It points out that the severity of sentencing does little to deter crime, but the _certainty_ of sentencing does.
I'm afraid there is an enormous number of excuses for punishment. There are also some psychologically and legally supported reasons for it. The fear of consequences is a very real deterrent to many types of crime and abuse, even though it is not completely effective.
It's insufficient because it doesn't specify _which_ are the specific practices or policies objected, nor the specific policies sought. I'm afraid it resembles the meandering goals of the democratic party in the last presidential election, and is likely to be as successful. This kind of unaimed bureaucratic meddling can be very destructive for the _next_ president, and for entirely innocent bystanders whose paperwork might simply happen to pass through the White House without Donald Trump's deliberate interference.
Individual bureaucrats have worked subtly against the goals of their leaders since bureaucracies existed. They've done so not only for moral reasons, but for self interest in protecting their jobs and enhancing their power. They've also done so to save lives: I'm afraid that I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law, but Oskar Schindler saved roughly 850 people from execution by the Nazi regime for which he was working by paying an enormous bribe to ship them elsewhere than the execution chambers. That was a violation of his bureaucratic authority, and even a criminal act, one for which Mr. Schindler is remembered as a hero.
Disobeying a criminal order, quietly, can be far more effective than publicly rebelling against it. Rebelling against a set of criminal orders within the any government can lead to charges of treason, as Edward Snowden understood when he exposed criminal behavior by the NSA and when Mark Felt exposed criminal activity of the Nixon Administration as the informant "Deep Throat". Whether this new anonymous source is _justified_ is a distinct question than whether an anonymous bureaucrat, working against a regime, can be justified.
"Requiring QA" would be a much more complex standard requiring quality evaluations of those quality evaluations. It would be unenforceable in practice, and could be abused to infringe politically on publishers and authors by rejecting their "QA". I think we'll find that ut is far simpler and more even handed, to simply refuse to fund research published in paid journals.
> The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers.
I'm sorry, but you seem to have left out a critical step. It is critical at review time for research staff. The number of publications is a critical factor for research personnel, even as co-authors or contributors. So yes, there is a fiscal benefit to the authors of content in paid-for publications.
> The people doing the work aren't making any profit anyway. The funding comes from taxes, and the scientists aren't getting paid if someone buys a copy of their paper,
Excuse me, please. What? Salaries paid to research staff come from that funding. Simply because funding comes from taxes does not by some curious substantiation not exist as "profit". And publication is critical to getting more funding, or to getting hired in education or getting tenure.
It is almost impossible to find new slide rules now: Only a few manufacturers are left, and even fewer manufacture them to the same standards as the best older slide rules. I still have one, which I keep as an heirloom.
The "road to hell" you describe is paved with the footsteps of the NSA personnel who were committing criminal acts against USA citizens and violating international treaties. Mr. Snowden reported _criminal activity_ by the NSA, activity which threatened the rights and liberties of millions of Americans. As best we can tell, Mr. Snowden did his best to _stop_ the criminal activity, and only escalated when the activity continued and he was blatantly ignored. It seemed clear that no court would be allowed to hear the evidence: what act, other than whistleblowing, would be moral at that point?
Mr. Assange is a different situation. the charges for which his extradition is being sought are for actions that do not involve his whistleblowing.
> Except that the spooks have no legal authority to compel the tech firms to do that,
They can, and have, in the past. Remember when SSL keys were limited to 80-bits for export use? Remember when they've insisted that Cisco include backdoor keys in their hardware? Remember the design of the Clipper Chip, which was only discarded when it was found that people could generate their own private keys that passed the checks for the "Law Enforcement Agency Field" checks?
Do you have _any_ reason to think that Mr. Snowden's behavior was _anything_ other than an honest man trying to report criminal behavior by his employers? He reported it internally, he tried to escalate it through his own NSA superiors, and he was ignored repeatedly. Mr. Putin is a former KGB head, of course he's taking advantage of it. But Mr. Snowden has behaved cautiously, and as ethically as possible, at every stage.
Ideally, the doors would be on a physically distinct network with its own switches, not a VLAN tagged distinct network. That means physically distinct wiring all the way back to the wiring closets, and no plain repeaters or shared switches all the way back to any central switch for the door controller system. In practice, a few facilities bother to set up tagged VLAN's on shared switches. But unless the switches are also programmed to only communicate with specific MAC addresses on specific ports, anyone can plug in a device on such port and access any of the relevant devices on any of the VLAN's, simply by network programming of the client device, even with an appropriately tagged virtual IP address. It's possible to do that kind of restriction of access: but developers in most networks will _despise_ the security people for doing this, because it tends to cause far more failures for the developers than it prevents. Even simple wiring practices such as "the red socket is for internal security, and non-registered devices plugged into it will make us turn off the port" will upset people.
The "internally open" network, including the infrastructure devices, is very common. Indeed, it is part of the core design of the "Internet of Things" approach to network design were all devices should be accessible at all times. Without testing, I'd not insist that Google does this. But the approach of "don't worry about the internal network, just leave it open" is very commonplace.
Oh, my. It's very easy to ask why someone else did not spend several times the amount of money in capital costs and support costs for an infrastructure change. What is the return on investment?
In theory? No. In practice? That is a very good question. These are, generally, skilled officers, educated well enough to manage a tremendous responsibility correctly and reliably. One or more of them might be clever enough to outsmart flawed security.
A colony would certainly multiply the complexity. NASA became accustomed, in the 1960's, to simply overpowering the limitations. It's feasible if you're willing to expend the resources. SpaceX has established what modern manufacturing and more precise manufacture can do. But a Mars mission, and return, demand far more. I'm working from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The delta V from earth to LEO can be estimated at about 10 kilometers/second, including drag. The delta V from LEO to Mars is approximately 4.3 km/s. Then landing on Mars is roughly 4.1 km/s. Then taking back _off_ from Mars is about 4.1 km/s. Then returning to Earth LEO is roughly 4.3 km/s. The return to Earth from there, I'll assume is an entirely distinct, much smaller system, essentially passengers, and can use aerobraking.
There are economies available: the payload landed on Mars would be much smaller than the payload sent to Mars orbit, and much of the payloads can be discarded at various steps. That is the basis for multi-stage rockets and multi-stage missions of many types. But our experience with moon landings need not apply well to this. The numbers for a moon landing are much less demanding. From Earth to LEO is still 10 km/second. From Earth LEO to the moon's LEO is only 1.31 km/s, and from there to the moon's surface is only 1.87 km/s. And all the fuel, both for propellant and the energy to expel the propellant to gain thrust, still has to be lifted to LEO. One has to build the equivalent of Saturn V's in space, to launch to and return humans from Mars.
There are many approaches to deal with the numbers. The simplest, as you've mentioned, is not to return the astronauts from the surface of Mars. That is an enormous simplification. If we can assure them a supply line, it need not even be a suicide mission. Another is to do the spacecraft manufacture, and possibly even fueling, from LEO on top of an existing industrial infrastructure. Water for propellant and energy stored as fuel is the issue there. This brings us very rapidly to solar sail technologies. Solar sails could, in theory, provide propellant payload free interplanetary missions, with _much_ faster flight times, on the order of 2 months. A very good NASA study in 2004, at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/..., laid out the broad requirements. The most efficient rocket propelled orbits, Hohmann orbits, give flight times of roughly 8 months.
If I may say, I do _not_ understand why NASA is not more actively pursuing solar sail technologies. Not only for space missions, but as solar mirror energy sources. They can be in orbits that do not obscure sunlight, they do not produce ecology destroying waste, and they could easily outproduce all of Earth's current energy production. There are very real difficulties harvesting the energy, and preventing them from being focused as weapons against Earth targets, but it can _scale_ in ways that wind, solar cell, or biofuels simply cannot. Optical astronomers will hate them, but the stable technologies for solar mirrors should provide very reduced cost for orbital telescopes, as well.
May I differ? The interests of other party's, including swift justice for the victim of a murder, are just the sort of factors for which a warrant or a subpoena can be be demanded. The teenager has a trial process, where the demand for a subpoena can be objected to the decision compared with British law, with precedents of the court, and with There has been enough evidence to seize his computer records.
The case is interesting because it is setting precedents in the UK. But the legal principals seem clear and in no way does the demand for the passphrase of the accused seem outrageous under such extreme circumstances.
It is also often far more "hate speech" today on the far political left than on the far political right, against whom the statutes are enforced. It's far easier to charge a skinhead than a 6 foot former football player transgender person who grips the back of the neck of a debate opponent who is at least 5 inches shorter and 70 pounds lighter and promise to send them home in an ambulance.
It's a very, very threatening and dominant move to grab the back of someone's neck. It is _scary_ for the person being grabbed.
I'm afraid I'm running into some of these issues socially. I have transgender friends, and relatives. But some of the speech from the younger political advocates is, _itself_, blatant hate speech. I'm old enough to remember the hippies, and the Black Panthers, and to have met people who were actively Communist during the Vietnam War. I'm afraid to say that they're historically and emotionally related to the most extreme of the modern leftist political candidates, with some grounding in the same political doctrines proven failures in eastern Europe and communist Asia.
It's not an enormous stretch of the imagination. It's an enormous leap in the amount of payload needed, and the net expenditure of energy, an increase of at least 100 in payload requirements and of roughly 1000 in propellant requirements. It's not merely the changes in kinetic and potential energy of the payload, changes which cannot be recovered efficiently by any spacecraft in the foreseeable future. It's the changes in kinetic and potential energy _of the propellant needed_ for Mars landing, Mars take-off, and a return to Earth orbit.
The cost and difficulty of launching such a mission from Earth's surface are so large that I do not see how a manned Mars mission is feasible without a permanent station in Earth orbit, one at which large scale construction is possible, to build the spacecraft already in orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, dear. You're quite right, and my analysis was confused. I've never seen "Open Access" written as a as the abbreviation.
The provisions of "you must provide copyright filters on any upload site" seem tailor made to restrict content uploaded to Wikileaks. That's something to keep in mind, if such laws are universal throughout the UK and make no clear accomodations for journalism.
Excuse me, but why are you posting that in response to _my_ message? I was trying to point out that Apple's encrypted client data is not the only data they have. Even with the client's data robustly encrypted, without master keys, that there is other client data Apple _would_ have available and unencrypted to their own billing departments and account management.
I I may also point out, "dirty" editing is not the same as careless or sloppy editing, or a failure to verify stories. All of them are troubling, but they're distinct issues.
The ownership and transfers of ownership of the phone, itself, would exist in Apple's customer records. So would customer information in their iTunes store, such as the date of purchases. That is not the same thing as copies of the data _on_ an Apple manufactured device, such as an iPhone. But along with Apple's customer tracking data, it's potentially quite useful for reporting customer location during the time of a crime under investigation.
Certainly, rehabilitation is not their _only_ mandate. But they are certainly judged and fiscally rewarded for it. And prison staff often, even normally, develop some emotional relationships with their inmates. It can be abusive, but these relationships can also be therapeutic, even becoming a sense of community or a sense of family.
> argues layer after layer after layer that humanity has systematically overvalued the punitive signal for behaviour modification
There is a significant behavior between this and idea that punishment does not work. That punishment can be, and has been, overused in some circumstances is not in question. There are numerous papers, such as this one from the American Psychiatric Association, http://www.apa.org/news/press/.... There is also this publication from the National Institute of Justice on the effectiveness of punishment as deterrence, https://nij.gov/five-things/pa... .
If I might say, the NIJ publication is particularly interesting. It points out that the severity of sentencing does little to deter crime, but the _certainty_ of sentencing does.
> There is no excuse for punishment anymore.
I'm afraid there is an enormous number of excuses for punishment. There are also some psychologically and legally supported reasons for it. The fear of consequences is a very real deterrent to many types of crime and abuse, even though it is not completely effective.
It's insufficient because it doesn't specify _which_ are the specific practices or policies objected, nor the specific policies sought. I'm afraid it resembles the meandering goals of the democratic party in the last presidential election, and is likely to be as successful. This kind of unaimed bureaucratic meddling can be very destructive for the _next_ president, and for entirely innocent bystanders whose paperwork might simply happen to pass through the White House without Donald Trump's deliberate interference.
The "agenda" is short on political goals, merely opposition to Mr. Trump's momen-to-moment policy changes.
Individual bureaucrats have worked subtly against the goals of their leaders since bureaucracies existed. They've done so not only for moral reasons, but for self interest in protecting their jobs and enhancing their power. They've also done so to save lives: I'm afraid that I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law, but Oskar Schindler saved roughly 850 people from execution by the Nazi regime for which he was working by paying an enormous bribe to ship them elsewhere than the execution chambers. That was a violation of his bureaucratic authority, and even a criminal act, one for which Mr. Schindler is remembered as a hero.
Disobeying a criminal order, quietly, can be far more effective than publicly rebelling against it. Rebelling against a set of criminal orders within the any government can lead to charges of treason, as Edward Snowden understood when he exposed criminal behavior by the NSA and when Mark Felt exposed criminal activity of the Nixon Administration as the informant "Deep Throat". Whether this new anonymous source is _justified_ is a distinct question than whether an anonymous bureaucrat, working against a regime, can be justified.
"Requiring QA" would be a much more complex standard requiring quality evaluations of those quality evaluations. It would be unenforceable in practice, and could be abused to infringe politically on publishers and authors by rejecting their "QA". I think we'll find that ut is far simpler and more even handed, to simply refuse to fund research published in paid journals.
> The mistake people in this thread are making is in assuming that for-profit publishing is providing a financial benefit to researchers.
I'm sorry, but you seem to have left out a critical step. It is critical at review time for research staff. The number of publications is a critical factor for research personnel, even as co-authors or contributors. So yes, there is a fiscal benefit to the authors of content in paid-for publications.
> The people doing the work aren't making any profit anyway. The funding comes from taxes, and the scientists aren't getting paid if someone buys a copy of their paper,
Excuse me, please. What? Salaries paid to research staff come from that funding. Simply because funding comes from taxes does not by some curious substantiation not exist as "profit". And publication is critical to getting more funding, or to getting hired in education or getting tenure.
It is almost impossible to find new slide rules now: Only a few manufacturers are left, and even fewer manufacture them to the same standards as the best older slide rules. I still have one, which I keep as an heirloom.
The "road to hell" you describe is paved with the footsteps of the NSA personnel who were committing criminal acts against USA citizens and violating international treaties. Mr. Snowden reported _criminal activity_ by the NSA, activity which threatened the rights and liberties of millions of Americans. As best we can tell, Mr. Snowden did his best to _stop_ the criminal activity, and only escalated when the activity continued and he was blatantly ignored. It seemed clear that no court would be allowed to hear the evidence: what act, other than whistleblowing, would be moral at that point?
Mr. Assange is a different situation. the charges for which his extradition is being sought are for actions that do not involve his whistleblowing.
Encryption need not necessarily be broken. One-time pads, for example, remain crypotgraphically robust, even with quantum computing applied to them.
> Except that the spooks have no legal authority to compel the tech firms to do that,
They can, and have, in the past. Remember when SSL keys were limited to 80-bits for export use? Remember when they've insisted that Cisco include backdoor keys in their hardware? Remember the design of the Clipper Chip, which was only discarded when it was found that people could generate their own private keys that passed the checks for the "Law Enforcement Agency Field" checks?
Do you have _any_ reason to think that Mr. Snowden's behavior was _anything_ other than an honest man trying to report criminal behavior by his employers? He reported it internally, he tried to escalate it through his own NSA superiors, and he was ignored repeatedly. Mr. Putin is a former KGB head, of course he's taking advantage of it. But Mr. Snowden has behaved cautiously, and as ethically as possible, at every stage.
Ideally, the doors would be on a physically distinct network with its own switches, not a VLAN tagged distinct network. That means physically distinct wiring all the way back to the wiring closets, and no plain repeaters or shared switches all the way back to any central switch for the door controller system. In practice, a few facilities bother to set up tagged VLAN's on shared switches. But unless the switches are also programmed to only communicate with specific MAC addresses on specific ports, anyone can plug in a device on such port and access any of the relevant devices on any of the VLAN's, simply by network programming of the client device, even with an appropriately tagged virtual IP address. It's possible to do that kind of restriction of access: but developers in most networks will _despise_ the security people for doing this, because it tends to cause far more failures for the developers than it prevents. Even simple wiring practices such as "the red socket is for internal security, and non-registered devices plugged into it will make us turn off the port" will upset people.
The "internally open" network, including the infrastructure devices, is very common. Indeed, it is part of the core design of the "Internet of Things" approach to network design were all devices should be accessible at all times. Without testing, I'd not insist that Google does this. But the approach of "don't worry about the internal network, just leave it open" is very commonplace.
Oh, my. It's very easy to ask why someone else did not spend several times the amount of money in capital costs and support costs for an infrastructure change. What is the return on investment?
In theory? No. In practice? That is a very good question. These are, generally, skilled officers, educated well enough to manage a tremendous responsibility correctly and reliably. One or more of them might be clever enough to outsmart flawed security.
A colony would certainly multiply the complexity. NASA became accustomed, in the 1960's, to simply overpowering the limitations. It's feasible if you're willing to expend the resources. SpaceX has established what modern manufacturing and more precise manufacture can do. But a Mars mission, and return, demand far more. I'm working from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The delta V from earth to LEO can be estimated at about 10 kilometers/second, including drag. The delta V from LEO to Mars is approximately 4.3 km/s. Then landing on Mars is roughly 4.1 km/s. Then taking back _off_ from Mars is about 4.1 km/s. Then returning to Earth LEO is roughly 4.3 km/s. The return to Earth from there, I'll assume is an entirely distinct, much smaller system, essentially passengers, and can use aerobraking.
There are economies available: the payload landed on Mars would be much smaller than the payload sent to Mars orbit, and much of the payloads can be discarded at various steps. That is the basis for multi-stage rockets and multi-stage missions of many types. But our experience with moon landings need not apply well to this. The numbers for a moon landing are much less demanding. From Earth to LEO is still 10 km/second. From Earth LEO to the moon's LEO is only 1.31 km/s, and from there to the moon's surface is only 1.87 km/s. And all the fuel, both for propellant and the energy to expel the propellant to gain thrust, still has to be lifted to LEO. One has to build the equivalent of Saturn V's in space, to launch to and return humans from Mars.
There are many approaches to deal with the numbers. The simplest, as you've mentioned, is not to return the astronauts from the surface of Mars. That is an enormous simplification. If we can assure them a supply line, it need not even be a suicide mission. Another is to do the spacecraft manufacture, and possibly even fueling, from LEO on top of an existing industrial infrastructure. Water for propellant and energy stored as fuel is the issue there. This brings us very rapidly to solar sail technologies. Solar sails could, in theory, provide propellant payload free interplanetary missions, with _much_ faster flight times, on the order of 2 months. A very good NASA study in 2004, at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/..., laid out the broad requirements. The most efficient rocket propelled orbits, Hohmann orbits, give flight times of roughly 8 months.
If I may say, I do _not_ understand why NASA is not more actively pursuing solar sail technologies. Not only for space missions, but as solar mirror energy sources. They can be in orbits that do not obscure sunlight, they do not produce ecology destroying waste, and they could easily outproduce all of Earth's current energy production. There are very real difficulties harvesting the energy, and preventing them from being focused as weapons against Earth targets, but it can _scale_ in ways that wind, solar cell, or biofuels simply cannot. Optical astronomers will hate them, but the stable technologies for solar mirrors should provide very reduced cost for orbital telescopes, as well.
May I differ? The interests of other party's, including swift justice for the victim of a murder, are just the sort of factors for which a warrant or a subpoena can be be demanded. The teenager has a trial process, where the demand for a subpoena can be objected to the decision compared with British law, with precedents of the court, and with There has been enough evidence to seize his computer records.
The case is interesting because it is setting precedents in the UK. But the legal principals seem clear and in no way does the demand for the passphrase of the accused seem outrageous under such extreme circumstances.
It is also often far more "hate speech" today on the far political left than on the far political right, against whom the statutes are enforced. It's far easier to charge a skinhead than a 6 foot former football player transgender person who grips the back of the neck of a debate opponent who is at least 5 inches shorter and 70 pounds lighter and promise to send them home in an ambulance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's a very, very threatening and dominant move to grab the back of someone's neck. It is _scary_ for the person being grabbed.
I'm afraid I'm running into some of these issues socially. I have transgender friends, and relatives. But some of the speech from the younger political advocates is, _itself_, blatant hate speech. I'm old enough to remember the hippies, and the Black Panthers, and to have met people who were actively Communist during the Vietnam War. I'm afraid to say that they're historically and emotionally related to the most extreme of the modern leftist political candidates, with some grounding in the same political doctrines proven failures in eastern Europe and communist Asia.
It's not an enormous stretch of the imagination. It's an enormous leap in the amount of payload needed, and the net expenditure of energy, an increase of at least 100 in payload requirements and of roughly 1000 in propellant requirements. It's not merely the changes in kinetic and potential energy of the payload, changes which cannot be recovered efficiently by any spacecraft in the foreseeable future. It's the changes in kinetic and potential energy _of the propellant needed_ for Mars landing, Mars take-off, and a return to Earth orbit.
The cost and difficulty of launching such a mission from Earth's surface are so large that I do not see how a manned Mars mission is feasible without a permanent station in Earth orbit, one at which large scale construction is possible, to build the spacecraft already in orbit.