The very next comment after mine starts with "Imagine if you can prick the finger of a hooker in a Pattaya bar while you're drinking". Tell me again that warning people not to share a device like that is unnecessary.
So rather than read, you decide to double-down on the stupid.
Let me explain this loudly and slower so you may understand.
Thrown away, into the trash. With the cap placed back on so nobody gets stuck. They come in boxes of 100 and they are fucking cheap. No sane person re-uses a lancet.
You're exhibiting some weapons-grade stupid there, guy.
"Pricking yourself with something that an infected person used is a sure-fire way to get an infection.
It's as if you don't even know how diabetic test strips, and other test strips like this one, work, or even that lancets of all kinds are disposable.
If you RTFA and click through to the Science Daily article, you'd read this:
"During the field testing in Rwanda, health care workers were given 30 minutes of training, which included a user-friendly interface to aid the user through each test, step-by-step pictorial directions, built-in timers to alert the user to next steps, and records of test results for later review. The vast majority of patients (97%) said they would recommend the dongle because of its fast turn-around time, ability to offer results for multiple diseases, and simplicity of procedure."
You are here: Logical Fallacies > Fallacies of Presumption > Slippery Slope Fallacy Slippery Slope Fallacy Explanation Slippery slope arguments falsely assume that one thing must lead to another. They begin by suggesting that if we do one thing then that will lead to another, and before we know it we'll be doing something that we don't want to do. They conclude that we therefore shouldn't do the first thing. The problem with these arguments is that it is possible to do the first thing that they mention without going on to do the other things; restraint is possible. Example (1) If you buy a Green Day album, then next you'll be buying Buzzcocks albums, and before you know it you'll be a punk with green hair and everything. (2) You don't want to become a punk. Therefore: (3) You shouldn't buy a Green Day album. This argument commits the slippery slope fallacy because it is perfectly possible to buy a Green Day album without going on to become a punk; we could buy the album and then stop there. The conclusion therefore hasn't been proven, because the argument's first premise is false.
In order for an argument to be valid, all the links in the chain of argument must work, otherwise it's a bogus argument. The moralist hand-wringing over genetic modification of embryos assumes that we will eventually be making monsters through our vanity. It assumes that there are parents that would willfully create damaged babies for whims. (yes, I know that there are people who go through with pregnancies where they know the baby will have chromosomal problems, but that's not the same as a/manufactured/ genetic problem).
It's difficult enough bringing up a "normal" child.
To make the matter even more confusing, Pirate Bayâ(TM)s downtime spurred the development of various spin-offs, all of which have steady userbases of their own. Isohunt.toâ(TM)s OldPirateBay.org is currently the largest, with millions of visitors per day and the number one spot for the search term Pirate Bay in Google.
Something something "Tarkin." and "If you strike me down I will become more powerful..." Star Wars quotes here.
The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all.
He wasn't comparing GTK+ to single-platform frameworks. He was comparing GTK+ to Qt. He said that Qt is a far better framework if you want cross platform, and he's right. And Qt is hardly just a "windows or OSX" framework. Qt really wipes the floor with GTK+ for cross-platform/especially/ if you want an application to run on Windows, OSX, Linux, Sailfish, Embedded Windows, Windows RT, Android, and Blackberry, QNX, and VxWorks.
" It's quite the opposite, we want to fix the problem with a smile on both ends and have a pleasant conversation then move on to the next nice person."
You haven't been the target of Comcast's "customer retention" have you?
I scheduled an install, and further discussion in the day with my SO made me cancel it. She had dealt with Comcast in the past and hates them with a passion. As a result, I had to cancel the installation. Rather than just cancel the installation, they fobbed me off on Customer Retention where the guy just wouldn't let up on making "special offers."
I'm a pretty intelligent guy, last I checked, and I don't like being rude too much, but this was starting to set me off. I told the guy "I know what your job is and it sucks. However, I'm not going to change my mind. Just put me down as "other" for the reason why I'm cancelling the order and move on." Whereupon he sighed and said "yeah, ok."
And you know what? He was just doing his job to script. It's just that the script is just/so/ bad and customer-hostile that it's offensive. I would have rated him a 10/10 for following the rules, but Comcast overall as a big fat 0 for customer service because of how they structured his job.
Lesser people would have lost their nut. My SO would have lost hers.
They are so far away from the professional world that anything they learn that is specific to any kind of software or technology will be completely obsolete once they've left school.
They should be doing something fun. The best thing that can be done is to point kids in directions that make them want to do it on their own - self-directed study and show them resources where they can find out how to do things. And let them form groups to create projects and don't limit them to just glowing phosphors on a screen. Lego Mindstorms (and its descendants) comes to mind.
They need to learn that computers are tools for creation and creativity.
Absolutely do/not/ take out all the fun by teaching only fundamentals or just teaching them how to use Word and Excel, aka "marketable skills."
Alex, your multiple repostings of identical content is spam.
I have used your software. It works as advertised. However, it doesn't justify multiple copies of the same message in the same thread. That doesn't do anything except make people tune you out as "mere noise" even if what you have to contribute might not be.
Honestly.
And you don't have to talk about yourself in the third person. OK?
They feel entitled to make a profit by any means necessary, while you feel entitled to their content or service by any means necessary.
The former is true
The latter isn't. If the "content providers" suddenly put all their stuff behind paywalls, I'd ignore them. I wouldn't even bother trying to "subvert" such paywalls. You know that "you've used up your free views for this month" BS that you run into with the NYT and such? My panties don't get in a twist, I just close the window and go elsewhere. I don't use bugmenot even today. I'm one of very many people who feel this way.
Let me reiterate: I block ads. They post their content and they take their chances. If they put up the paywalls, they "disappear" for me and I'm fine with it.
So let's ask the "what if everyone did that" evaluation of human behavior to examine what damage might be done if all that revenue disappeared from the Internet: Many "content providers" that depend purely on ad revenue would close (like Gawker Media, Dice, etc.,) and it would wind up like it was back in the mid 1990s shortly before the explosion of commercial "content."
Collect everything means that all your intelligence is hidden by piles and piles of cat memes.
Because the Internet isn't a series of tubes, it's a single cat with infinite meowing heads and infinite tails to pull.
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -- Attributed to Albert Einstein.
But the reality is, most sites with ads are infested with literally dozens of third party crapware, places which sideload junk into your system (specifically through crap like Flash), and which want to collect collate and sell your private information.
This.
And you know what I've found out? The "serve ads" and "collate demographics to sell" industries have merged completely. There is probably nobody left that merely serves ads and doesn't track across websites. Go ahead and delete Adblock Plus and run/only/ Ghostery and Privacy Badger. You get nearly the exact same results as if you ran an adblocker that uses a popular list.
Why Privacy Badger on top of Ghostery? Because it gets the things whitelisted by Ghostery. You didn't think that Ghostery was pure as the driven snow, did you?
All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Robert Morris, December 25, 1783
I don't see stupid passwords as a problem if they're used in situations where it doesn't matter.
That's because the people who pick 123456 as passwords never consider if it matters or not. Most people consider their mail account something that matters, yet trying out various uname/pw combinations with gmail that come from a porn site invariably works.
I don't know what to tell you, man, people are stupid with passwords and it's a documented problem.
>complain about article summarizing the problem in general >demanding hand-holding. >your computer is connected to the largest information retrieval system ever invented. >can't be bothered to do your own research or bother to even google
From everywhere. From pron.com, for example. Plaintext usernames, emails, and passwords. With.mil addresses and admin addresses to boot. They are there if you bother to look.
From a csv file I have of the pronz.com list:
Hi! We like porn (sometimes) so these are email/password combinations from pron.com which we plundered for the lulz
Check out these government and military email addresses that signed up to the porn site...
They are too busy fapping to defend their country:
for what reasons?
For money and for the lulz, as above.
on what devices?
Everything.
Also if PWs are from web pages? what are the pages?
Pron, government, banking, shopping, etc...
because if they are not secure pages (work, banks, personal info) most people simply dont care.
This is the problem, in a nutshell. People just don't care about even their banking passwords.
I mean to leave comments on damn near any page, you need to register. I know on some pages ive created accts to leave a post and never plan on going back, im sure ive used some weak passwords for those sites.
The thing is that people use the same "throw away passwords" everywhere. The same ones, across multiple sites including banking. Many of the above uname/password pairs worked in gmail and facebook.
"But it's too much trouble to have different passwords everywhere"
No it isn't. It's actually easier. Use a password manager. It's like a keyring, but not only do the keys fit only individual locks, the "keyring" (password manager) does the typing for you for password generation and logins. For example, through some of my own dumbassery (which I realized within 10 minutes of the dumbassery), I had to reset all my passwords one day. It took me only an hour with Lastpass including generating secure passwords. It would have taken me the better part of half-a workday to reset them manually.
Yahoo lost control of my login credentials twice. Apparently I have been to Sweden and Bulgaria. After that, I got a password manager and never looked back.
You will have to take my password manager from my cold dead hands.
"But what if the password manager goes tits-up?"
You export your credentials to a.csv file and print it out and save in a safe place offsite.
All my passwords look like this: GvY0H025195BfN2MleZWx5Sra
Try finding that in a rainbow table.
its a little hard to claim anything based on this data that is worth anything.
Replying to you mostly for myself, to write down what I try to explain to people when it comes to what PGP actually is and if anyone gets edumacated by what I wrote, that's fine.
The problem is sending keys - and most users would just blindly well, email them around.
This is why we have public key encryption, e.g., PGP, in the first place.
You're supposed to post/email/etc the public key to your various contacts to encrypt. It doesn't matter what the channel is that you use to transport the public key - email, web page, broadcasting as a numbers station, shouting, etc. The public key can be intercepted all the time by TLAs and other nefarious mob-related organizations. It doesn't matter.
Alice: "Hey Bob, I'm trying to figure out this encrypted mail thing. Send me some encrypted mail. Here's my public key."
public key gets sent through normal email
Bob: "OK, got it." Bob then encrypts his message professing his undying love with the public key and sends it to Alice. He also sends his public key to Alice with it.
Alice decrypts with her private half (which she never gives out) of the public/private key pair and reads the email.
Alice says "I didn't know you loved me." to Bob.
Then there's key management because you have to import those keys into your contacts.
Modern MUAs handle these easily. It's up to the user to save the keys. There is just so much hand-holding that can be done.
>Other than PGP, such as anything using AES is problematic
>GPG
Both PGP and GPG are compatible with each other.
It's not just that MUAs aren't all configurable to use other encryption algorithms, it's that anything that uses symmetric keys, like AES, requires a key exchange out-of-band for it to be any practical use. And that is problematic in itself.
>So if they are not using to investigate crimes, what is the end game of this mass surveillance?
To pillage. To find who's got the money, boats, cars, etc., and are morally questionable/socially insignificant enough that the general public doesn't get up-in-arms about it when the DEA takes their stuff.
Increasing the wages of an auto-worker from 115k (average $55/hr) to 230k/yr doesn't mean that the price of the automobile goes from 30k to 60k. Wages are currently appx 10 percent of the cost of an automobile.
If you really believe that doubling wages doubles the price of goods, you don't know much at all about manufacturing.
Recent evidence has come to light that suggests that pyramid style chain letters may have pre-dated Dave Rhodes by a considerable margin. Palaentologists recently deciphered the following, painted on a cave wall on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. MAKE POINTY STICKS FAST!!!
Hello, not-tribe-member. Urk name Urk. Many moons ago, Urk in bad way. Urk kicked out of cave by Thag. Thag bigger than Urk, Thag take Urk spiky club, Urka (Urk wo-man). Urk not able kill deer, must eat leaves, berries. Urk flee from wolves.
Today, Urk big chief. Urk have best cave, many wives, many pointy sticks. Urk tell how.
WHAT DO: make one pointy stick and take to cave places below. Add own cave place to bottom of list, take cave place off top. Put new message on walls many caves. Wait. Many pointy sticks soon come! This not crime! Urk ask shaman, gods say okay.
HERE LIST:
1) Urk
First cave
Olduvai Gorge
few) Thag (not that Thag, other Thag)
old dead tree
by laked shaped like mammoth
few) Og
big rock with overhang
near pig game trail
Many) Zog
river caves
where river meet big water
Urk hope not-tribe-member do what Urk say do. That only way it work.
(c) Dave Hemming 1998. Circulate how you please, but keep my name on it.
The point of going dark is to make surveillance expensive. You want "them" to spend as much money as possible. Currently, just about everyone sends plaintext through the Interbutt, for example. Archiving all of this in a building in Utah and using search technology to sift through it, building "instant dossiers," is well within the budget capabilities of many governments.
If everyone uses encryption, there isn't enough computing power in the universe to sift through all of that. At that point, "they" will have to devote actual warm bodies to do surveillance, aka "spies." Spies cost money. They cost a not insignificant amount of money to train and require weekly paychecks. Plus they are quite a bit slower than computers sifting through plain text and unencrypted Skype calls.
What we want to do is break their budgets.
The only drawback to all of this is the instant you mention encryption to Joe User, you get this glassy eyed stare, dead eyes, like a doll's eyes, to butcher a line from Jaws.
"That's because Republicans believe in the free market not communism."
Funny, the current bunch Ds are typically to the right of Reagan.
And no, the Rs aren't in favor of any kind of free market either. And "free markets" don't exist, ever - they are an imaginary construct much like "friction free inclined planes" in physics.
Slashdot Mirror
>use an extreme outlier scenario. Evidence being: "I have friends who..."
>represent this situation as "typical" and "this is why the test shouldn't be available.
1. Your friends are violent criminals/psychopaths. They will harm people regardless of this being available. Pick some better friends.
2. Fucking Really?
--
BMO
The very next comment after mine starts with "Imagine if you can prick the finger of a hooker in a Pattaya bar while you're drinking". Tell me again that warning people not to share a device like that is unnecessary.
So rather than read, you decide to double-down on the stupid.
Let me explain this loudly and slower so you may understand.
T_H_E__L_A_N_C_E_T_S__A_R_E__D_I_S_P_O_S_E_D__A_F_T_E_R__U_S_E
Thrown away, into the trash. With the cap placed back on so nobody gets stuck. They come in boxes of 100 and they are fucking cheap. No sane person re-uses a lancet.
You're exhibiting some weapons-grade stupid there, guy.
--
BMO
"Pricking yourself with something that an infected person used is a sure-fire way to get an infection.
It's as if you don't even know how diabetic test strips, and other test strips like this one, work, or even that lancets of all kinds are disposable.
If you RTFA and click through to the Science Daily article, you'd read this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
That is fucking spectacular.
Shut the fuck up.
--
BMO
Slippery slope fallacy.
------------
http://www.logicalfallacies.in...
In order for an argument to be valid, all the links in the chain of argument must work, otherwise it's a bogus argument. The moralist hand-wringing over genetic modification of embryos assumes that we will eventually be making monsters through our vanity. It assumes that there are parents that would willfully create damaged babies for whims. (yes, I know that there are people who go through with pregnancies where they know the baby will have chromosomal problems, but that's not the same as a /manufactured/ genetic problem).
It's difficult enough bringing up a "normal" child.
--
BMO
"And the futile game of whack-a-mole continues."
Something something "Tarkin." and "If you strike me down I will become more powerful..." Star Wars quotes here.
--
BMO
I'm just a designer, and I've never done any C++ programming,
You don't particularly need to know C++
Qt has bindings for even Lua if you want.
--
BMO
The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all.
He wasn't comparing GTK+ to single-platform frameworks. He was comparing GTK+ to Qt. He said that Qt is a far better framework if you want cross platform, and he's right. And Qt is hardly just a "windows or OSX" framework. Qt really wipes the floor with GTK+ for cross-platform /especially/ if you want an application to run on Windows, OSX, Linux, Sailfish, Embedded Windows, Windows RT, Android, and Blackberry, QNX, and VxWorks.
--
BMO
" It's quite the opposite, we want to fix the problem with a smile on both ends and have a pleasant conversation then move on to the next nice person."
You haven't been the target of Comcast's "customer retention" have you?
I scheduled an install, and further discussion in the day with my SO made me cancel it. She had dealt with Comcast in the past and hates them with a passion. As a result, I had to cancel the installation. Rather than just cancel the installation, they fobbed me off on Customer Retention where the guy just wouldn't let up on making "special offers."
I'm a pretty intelligent guy, last I checked, and I don't like being rude too much, but this was starting to set me off. I told the guy "I know what your job is and it sucks. However, I'm not going to change my mind. Just put me down as "other" for the reason why I'm cancelling the order and move on." Whereupon he sighed and said "yeah, ok."
And you know what? He was just doing his job to script. It's just that the script is just /so/ bad and customer-hostile that it's offensive. I would have rated him a 10/10 for following the rules, but Comcast overall as a big fat 0 for customer service because of how they structured his job.
Lesser people would have lost their nut. My SO would have lost hers.
--
BMO
This.
They are so far away from the professional world that anything they learn that is specific to any kind of software or technology will be completely obsolete once they've left school.
They should be doing something fun. The best thing that can be done is to point kids in directions that make them want to do it on their own - self-directed study and show them resources where they can find out how to do things. And let them form groups to create projects and don't limit them to just glowing phosphors on a screen. Lego Mindstorms (and its descendants) comes to mind.
They need to learn that computers are tools for creation and creativity.
Absolutely do /not/ take out all the fun by teaching only fundamentals or just teaching them how to use Word and Excel, aka "marketable skills."
--
BMO
Alex, your multiple repostings of identical content is spam.
I have used your software. It works as advertised. However, it doesn't justify multiple copies of the same message in the same thread. That doesn't do anything except make people tune you out as "mere noise" even if what you have to contribute might not be.
Honestly.
And you don't have to talk about yourself in the third person. OK?
Peace.
--
BMO/Dan
>clarityray
Is dead.
Acquired by Yahoo.
Just so you can update your spam. HTH.
--
BMO
They feel entitled to make a profit by any means necessary, while you feel entitled to their content or service by any means necessary.
The former is true
The latter isn't. If the "content providers" suddenly put all their stuff behind paywalls, I'd ignore them. I wouldn't even bother trying to "subvert" such paywalls. You know that "you've used up your free views for this month" BS that you run into with the NYT and such? My panties don't get in a twist, I just close the window and go elsewhere. I don't use bugmenot even today. I'm one of very many people who feel this way.
Let me reiterate: I block ads. They post their content and they take their chances. If they put up the paywalls, they "disappear" for me and I'm fine with it.
So let's ask the "what if everyone did that" evaluation of human behavior to examine what damage might be done if all that revenue disappeared from the Internet: Many "content providers" that depend purely on ad revenue would close (like Gawker Media, Dice, etc.,) and it would wind up like it was back in the mid 1990s shortly before the explosion of commercial "content."
Please, please let this happen.
--
BMO
That's the problem isn't it?
Collect everything means that all your intelligence is hidden by piles and piles of cat memes.
Because the Internet isn't a series of tubes, it's a single cat with infinite meowing heads and infinite tails to pull.
--
BMO
But the reality is, most sites with ads are infested with literally dozens of third party crapware, places which sideload junk into your system (specifically through crap like Flash), and which want to collect collate and sell your private information.
This.
And you know what I've found out? The "serve ads" and "collate demographics to sell" industries have merged completely. There is probably nobody left that merely serves ads and doesn't track across websites. Go ahead and delete Adblock Plus and run /only/ Ghostery and Privacy Badger. You get nearly the exact same results as if you ran an adblocker that uses a popular list.
Why Privacy Badger on top of Ghostery? Because it gets the things whitelisted by Ghostery. You didn't think that Ghostery was pure as the driven snow, did you?
--
BMO
All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Robert Morris, December 25, 1783
I don't see stupid passwords as a problem if they're used in situations where it doesn't matter.
That's because the people who pick 123456 as passwords never consider if it matters or not. Most people consider their mail account something that matters, yet trying out various uname/pw combinations with gmail that come from a porn site invariably works.
I don't know what to tell you, man, people are stupid with passwords and it's a documented problem.
>complain about article summarizing the problem in general
>demanding hand-holding.
>your computer is connected to the largest information retrieval system ever invented.
>can't be bothered to do your own research or bother to even google
PEBKAC. Yours.
--
BMO
Now all I need is a 10 button mouse and an interface reference!
This just in: Specialty software requires (or is more useful) with specialty hardware. Film at 11.
It's like the SpaceNavigator and SpacePilot never existed for CAD/modeling. It's as if all those 16 button tablet pucks never existed.
Also complex software requires documentation/references. Blender != MSPAINT.EXE
--
BMO
ok, so it was leaked passwords....but from where?
From everywhere. From pron.com, for example. Plaintext usernames, emails, and passwords. With .mil addresses and admin addresses to boot. They are there if you bother to look.
From a csv file I have of the pronz.com list:
Hi! We like porn (sometimes) so these are email/password
combinations from pron.com which we plundered for the lulz
Check out these government and military email
addresses that signed up to the porn site...
They are too busy fapping to defend their country:
for what reasons?
For money and for the lulz, as above.
on what devices?
Everything.
Also if PWs are from web pages? what are the pages?
Pron, government, banking, shopping, etc...
because if they are not secure pages (work, banks, personal info) most people simply dont care.
This is the problem, in a nutshell. People just don't care about even their banking passwords.
I mean to leave comments on damn near any page, you need to register. I know on some pages ive created accts to leave a post and never plan on going back, im sure ive used some weak passwords for those sites.
The thing is that people use the same "throw away passwords" everywhere. The same ones, across multiple sites including banking. Many of the above uname/password pairs worked in gmail and facebook.
"But it's too much trouble to have different passwords everywhere"
No it isn't. It's actually easier. Use a password manager. It's like a keyring, but not only do the keys fit only individual locks, the "keyring" (password manager) does the typing for you for password generation and logins. For example, through some of my own dumbassery (which I realized within 10 minutes of the dumbassery), I had to reset all my passwords one day. It took me only an hour with Lastpass including generating secure passwords. It would have taken me the better part of half-a workday to reset them manually.
Yahoo lost control of my login credentials twice. Apparently I have been to Sweden and Bulgaria. After that, I got a password manager and never looked back.
You will have to take my password manager from my cold dead hands.
"But what if the password manager goes tits-up?"
You export your credentials to a .csv file and print it out and save in a safe place offsite.
All my passwords look like this: GvY0H025195BfN2MleZWx5Sra
Try finding that in a rainbow table.
its a little hard to claim anything based on this data that is worth anything.
Only because you lack imagination.
--
BMO
"Not now, Mudhead, I have to go to the last meeting of the philatelists club!"
"I didn't know you masturbated."
Firesign in my Slashdot? It's more likely than you think.
--
BMO
Replying to you mostly for myself, to write down what I try to explain to people when it comes to what PGP actually is and if anyone gets edumacated by what I wrote, that's fine.
The problem is sending keys - and most users would just blindly well, email them around.
This is why we have public key encryption, e.g., PGP, in the first place.
You're supposed to post/email/etc the public key to your various contacts to encrypt. It doesn't matter what the channel is that you use to transport the public key - email, web page, broadcasting as a numbers station, shouting, etc. The public key can be intercepted all the time by TLAs and other nefarious mob-related organizations. It doesn't matter.
Alice: "Hey Bob, I'm trying to figure out this encrypted mail thing. Send me some encrypted mail. Here's my public key."
public key gets sent through normal email
Bob: "OK, got it." Bob then encrypts his message professing his undying love with the public key and sends it to Alice. He also sends his public key to Alice with it.
Alice decrypts with her private half (which she never gives out) of the public/private key pair and reads the email.
Alice says "I didn't know you loved me." to Bob.
Then there's key management because you have to import those keys into your contacts.
Modern MUAs handle these easily. It's up to the user to save the keys. There is just so much hand-holding that can be done.
>Other than PGP, such as anything using AES is problematic
>GPG
Both PGP and GPG are compatible with each other.
It's not just that MUAs aren't all configurable to use other encryption algorithms, it's that anything that uses symmetric keys, like AES, requires a key exchange out-of-band for it to be any practical use. And that is problematic in itself.
--
BMO
>So if they are not using to investigate crimes, what is the end game of this mass surveillance?
To pillage. To find who's got the money, boats, cars, etc., and are morally questionable/socially insignificant enough that the general public doesn't get up-in-arms about it when the DEA takes their stuff.
--
BMO
Increasing the wages of an auto-worker from 115k (average $55/hr) to 230k/yr doesn't mean that the price of the automobile goes from 30k to 60k. Wages are currently appx 10 percent of the cost of an automobile.
If you really believe that doubling wages doubles the price of goods, you don't know much at all about manufacturing.
--
BMO
Recent evidence has come to light that suggests that pyramid style chain
letters may have pre-dated Dave Rhodes by a considerable margin.
Palaentologists recently deciphered the following, painted on a cave
wall on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.
MAKE POINTY STICKS FAST!!!
Hello, not-tribe-member. Urk name Urk. Many moons ago, Urk in bad way.
Urk kicked out of cave by Thag. Thag bigger than Urk, Thag take Urk
spiky club, Urka (Urk wo-man). Urk not able kill deer, must eat leaves,
berries. Urk flee from wolves.
Today, Urk big chief. Urk have best cave, many wives, many pointy sticks.
Urk tell how.
WHAT DO: make one pointy stick and take to cave places below. Add own
cave place to bottom of list, take cave place off top. Put new message
on walls many caves. Wait. Many pointy sticks soon come! This not crime!
Urk ask shaman, gods say okay.
HERE LIST:
1) Urk
First cave
Olduvai Gorge
few) Thag (not that Thag, other Thag)
old dead tree
by laked shaped like mammoth
few) Og
big rock with overhang
near pig game trail
Many) Zog
river caves
where river meet big water
Urk hope not-tribe-member do what Urk say do. That only way it work.
(c) Dave Hemming 1998. Circulate how you please, but keep my name on it.
The point of going dark is to make surveillance expensive. You want "them" to spend as much money as possible. Currently, just about everyone sends plaintext through the Interbutt, for example. Archiving all of this in a building in Utah and using search technology to sift through it, building "instant dossiers," is well within the budget capabilities of many governments.
If everyone uses encryption, there isn't enough computing power in the universe to sift through all of that. At that point, "they" will have to devote actual warm bodies to do surveillance, aka "spies." Spies cost money. They cost a not insignificant amount of money to train and require weekly paychecks. Plus they are quite a bit slower than computers sifting through plain text and unencrypted Skype calls.
What we want to do is break their budgets.
The only drawback to all of this is the instant you mention encryption to Joe User, you get this glassy eyed stare, dead eyes, like a doll's eyes, to butcher a line from Jaws.
--
BMO
"That's because Republicans believe in the free market not communism."
Funny, the current bunch Ds are typically to the right of Reagan.
And no, the Rs aren't in favor of any kind of free market either. And "free markets" don't exist, ever - they are an imaginary construct much like "friction free inclined planes" in physics.
--
BMO