For what it's worth, in Ireland the three GSM operators have started SIM-locking their phones. This does make a certain amount of sense, since the phonese are generally highly subsidizied.
BUT if you have a SIM-free phone, any operator's SIM will work in it.
Also, they generally agree to un-SIM-lock the phone after a certain period (e.g. a year) or if you pay a small charge (50 euros).
Come on, imagine being a patent examiner... all day looking at other peoples' ideas, most of them for better moustrap designs or long strings of dna. It must be incredibly boring. If I was doing that and saw the swinging application, of course I'd approve it.
In this case, no-one disputed that the email exchange had taken place... authentication was not at issue. Insetead, it was the legal concept of what constitutes a binding signature.
I wonder what this means for EBay's statement that all bids are binding contracts *except* real estate sales.
If you read the linked story, this doesn;t seem to have anything to do with "processing the CIA's data" at all... It's funded by the CIA's VC arm, but is going to target "large companies and government organizations". This could mean anything, but unless you're a real conspiracy theorist, it's hard to see this as something exclusively CIA-related.
Top 5 ways to have fun with an airport face scanner
5: Wear a Nixon mask and watch the security guys do a double-take looking at their computer readout
4: Attach a/bin/laden mask to the back of someone's back and watch the fireworks
3: Sell time on the system to Oil of Olay to spot oily, reflective skin
2: Adapt it to seek out hot chicks
1: Link it to Am I Hot Or Not!
Does anyone but me wonder if the NSA already has a way to break even "strong" cypto? I don't think that even the NSA has sufficient amounts of pure CPU to do brute-force attacks on decent size keys, but we do have to consider the possibility, however remote, that the NSA has a short cut of some sort. After all, they are known to have had knowledge of advanced attacks on older cryptosystems well before the rest of us.
On the one hand, I doubt that anyone has discovered a quick way to factor the product of large primes (or other "tricks" that could be used to attack strong crypto). On the other hand, I believe that if anyone has discovered such an exploit, it would be the NSA. And I'm sure we wouldn't have heard about it.
Of course, if this is the case, why would the government be pushing for key escrow etc? Possibly because most politicians wouldn't know what was in the NSA's bag of tricks. Legislatively enforced crypto backdoors are just a political kneejerk reaction.
I have no objection in priciple to having a compulsory ID. The real issue is who could require you to produce it, under what conditions.
For example, could the police ask for it if you're arrested? What about if you're a suspect in a crime? What about at a "routine stop" without you being under suspicion? How these rules are defined are the key to how much it would invade our privacy.
My own feeling is that even if it started out in an innocuous fashion (voluntary in most situations) it would slowly creep into more and more everyday transactions, endangering privacy, much like the SSN is starting to.
There are highly specialized surgeons that are not available in every country, even in technologicly advanced ones. Once all the bugs are worked out, which might be decades from now, these surgeons will be available to anyone. Also, with any luck, high speed connections will be much more commonplace, even in remote areas.
I don't mean to downplay the significance of this event, but in reality it will be cheaper to fly the doctor to the patient, no matter how remote the area, than to lay (or probably even use) fiber, for a long, long time.
One signifiacant point was that the doctors were only happy to put up with latency of a few hundred ms, and of course this latecy had to be guaranteed. Its unlikely that it will be possible to do this over shared linked for a long time.
Not only that, but now he will have a record. These day, having a criminal record makes it extremely difficult to get a job; impossible to get a government job; extremely difficult to visit other countries where visas are required; and generally messes up the rest of your life.
If he had done something clever he could have hoped to get a job doing computer security, but as a scriptkiddie who got caught, he's basically messed up his whole life.
It's no longer strictly true that a URL points to a "single point" somewhere. The widespread use of content delivery networks and content modification systems means that in practice a URL refers to "any copy of a particular resource, possibly as modified based on factors including your location, browser type and language preferences".
Many URL purists will protest that this violates the spirit of URLs, but the flip side is that this allows much more efficient and flexible distribution of content.
Al
I seem to recall that some consumer group did a test of the wired handsfree kits that are very popular in the UK/Ireland. They discovered that in fact they made the radiation *worse*.
It turns out that the piece of wire connecting the phone to the earpiece was acting as an antenna and somehow focusing the radiation even more...
>There isn't anything in democracy that says you need to know anything before you vote.
I agree completely. You can be dumb as an ox and you still get a vote. But my point was that right now, voting is a pain. I think that the only people who bother to vote feel somewhat strongly about the issues. This seems to indicate that they probably know something about the issues.
I don't think that this is an unsolvable problem. Consider the following architecture:
1) Prove you are John Doe. This can be done online using PKI or offline using conventional methods. However this is done, you are then given a "voting token" electronically signed by the election authority. This can be completely anonymous -- it's just like the paper voting slip you're given for some elections once you've shown ID. It has no identifying marks, but you only get one once you've authenticated yourself.
2) Cast your vote. All you need here is a valid token. Tokens can obviously only be used once, and forging them is as difficult as forging any digital signiture.
I'm sure that there are more refined versions of this idea, but it certainly can be done.
I agree, but there is a flip side to this... if voting became *too* easy, people might be inclined to vote even if they didn't really care about the issue, just because they have nothing better to do (like some people post to slahdot:-))
At the moment, as you say, the only people who vote tend to have strong opinions, but I'd like to think that this means that they tend to know something about the issues as well.
I do support online voting, as it will eventually help to return power to the (e-)masses, but there is a danger in going too far...
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, in Ireland the three GSM operators have started SIM-locking their phones. This does make a certain amount of sense, since the phonese are generally highly subsidizied.
BUT if you have a SIM-free phone, any operator's SIM will work in it.
Also, they generally agree to un-SIM-lock the phone after a certain period (e.g. a year) or if you pay a small charge (50 euros).
Come on, imagine being a patent examiner... all day looking at other peoples' ideas, most of them for better moustrap designs or long strings of dna. It must be incredibly boring. If I was doing that and saw the swinging application, of course I'd approve it.
I wonder what this means for EBay's statement that all bids are binding contracts *except* real estate sales.
If you read the linked story, this doesn;t seem to have anything to do with "processing the CIA's data" at all... It's funded by the CIA's VC arm, but is going to target "large companies and government organizations". This could mean anything, but unless you're a real conspiracy theorist, it's hard to see this as something exclusively CIA-related.
Top 5 ways to have fun with an airport face scanner
/bin/laden mask to the back of someone's back and watch the fireworks
5: Wear a Nixon mask and watch the security guys do a double-take looking at their computer readout
4: Attach a
3: Sell time on the system to Oil of Olay to spot oily, reflective skin
2: Adapt it to seek out hot chicks
1: Link it to Am I Hot Or Not!
On the one hand, I doubt that anyone has discovered a quick way to factor the product of large primes (or other "tricks" that could be used to attack strong crypto). On the other hand, I believe that if anyone has discovered such an exploit, it would be the NSA. And I'm sure we wouldn't have heard about it.
Of course, if this is the case, why would the government be pushing for key escrow etc? Possibly because most politicians wouldn't know what was in the NSA's bag of tricks. Legislatively enforced crypto backdoors are just a political kneejerk reaction.
Or am I just geeting paranoid?
For example, could the police ask for it if you're arrested? What about if you're a suspect in a crime? What about at a "routine stop" without you being under suspicion? How these rules are defined are the key to how much it would invade our privacy.
My own feeling is that even if it started out in an innocuous fashion (voluntary in most situations) it would slowly creep into more and more everyday transactions, endangering privacy, much like the SSN is starting to.
I don't mean to downplay the significance of this event, but in reality it will be cheaper to fly the doctor to the patient, no matter how remote the area, than to lay (or probably even use) fiber, for a long, long time.
One signifiacant point was that the doctors were only happy to put up with latency of a few hundred ms, and of course this latecy had to be guaranteed. Its unlikely that it will be possible to do this over shared linked for a long time.
Not only that, but now he will have a record. These day, having a criminal record makes it extremely difficult to get a job; impossible to get a government job; extremely difficult to visit other countries where visas are required; and generally messes up the rest of your life.
If he had done something clever he could have hoped to get a job doing computer security, but as a scriptkiddie who got caught, he's basically messed up his whole life.
Many URL purists will protest that this violates the spirit of URLs, but the flip side is that this allows much more efficient and flexible distribution of content. Al
I seem to recall that some consumer group did a test of the wired handsfree kits that are very popular in the UK/Ireland. They discovered that in fact they made the radiation *worse*.
It turns out that the piece of wire connecting the phone to the earpiece was acting as an antenna and somehow focusing the radiation even more...
>There isn't anything in democracy that says you need to know anything before you vote.
I agree completely. You can be dumb as an ox and you still get a vote. But my point was that right now, voting is a pain. I think that the only people who bother to vote feel somewhat strongly about the issues. This seems to indicate that they probably know something about the issues.
At least I hope so!
I don't think that this is an unsolvable problem. Consider the following architecture:
1) Prove you are John Doe. This can be done online using PKI or offline using conventional methods. However this is done, you are then given a "voting token" electronically signed by the election authority. This can be completely anonymous -- it's just like the paper voting slip you're given for some elections once you've shown ID. It has no identifying marks, but you only get one once you've authenticated yourself.
2) Cast your vote. All you need here is a valid token. Tokens can obviously only be used once, and forging them is as difficult as forging any digital signiture.
I'm sure that there are more refined versions of this idea, but it certainly can be done.
I agree, but there is a flip side to this... if voting became *too* easy, people might be inclined to vote even if they didn't really care about the issue, just because they have nothing better to do (like some people post to slahdot :-))
At the moment, as you say, the only people who vote tend to have strong opinions, but I'd like to think that this means that they tend to know something about the issues as well.
I do support online voting, as it will eventually help to return power to the (e-)masses, but there is a danger in going too far...