Maybe I'm missing something, but why are the people who don't agree with anthropogenic global warming theory throwing a party over this story? It's about a new climate model that, if it's accurate, says CO2 emissions may raise temperatures slightly less than previously thought. 2/3 of the predicted temperature range lies within the range predicted by the IPCC in 2007. The very best interpretation of this data from a "skeptic" point of view is that AGW is even better supported with evidence, with only the exact impact being refined. This definitely doesn't look to me like evidence that AGW theory is alarmist, un-scientific FUD.
Except the cops aren't going to put a cop of every corner and write down every plate because it would be way too manpower intensive. And people know that, so they have a reasonable expectation that their movements won't be tracked by the police without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Technology makes casual surveillance so much easier that the cops can and will track your every move in public even if they have absolutely no reason to do so. In other words, technology isn't simply the next generation of something that police are already doing, it allows a much different surveillance approach that is more invasive than what was practical before. The law needs to control that kind of thing in a way that simply wasn't necessary before.
No, the encryption ISN'T completely broken. If I have an encryption system that uses passwords for security, and you guess my password, the security is broken for this instance of the system...but I can just pick another password and security is restored. "Security through obscurity" doesn't mean security based on ANY secret, it means security through secrecy in some fundamental element of the system, especially when such a secret makes the system brittle. If you steal my key, I can simply rekey a lock and I'm just as secure as before. But if I ALWAYS leave a spare key in the same spot, once you figure that out the entire system is fundamentally broken. That's security through obscurity.
IP addresses don't definitively identify individuals (and I'm not aware of any case where that alone was used to convict someone), but disallowing their use as probable cause for a search warrant would seem to set an unreasonably high legal bar.
I imagine a better solution would be to get a virtual or dedicated server at some hosting company, clearly labeled as a TOR exit node (have it host a webpage explaining that fact) and if you can, ONLY use it for that. If you set up a separate corporate entity that owns the server, even better. The law protects you no matter where you run the exit node, but if you want to avoid even being personally investigated at all, you definitely need some significant separation between your home and your exit node.
I imagine it's easier for hosting companies because they aren't the prime suspects of whatever the crime is, they're simply assisting the investigation. The person running a TOR exit node IS the prime suspect, because of how TOR works. A hosting company has records and logs of who's using what, a history of helping in police investigations and not being the guilty party. But as far as the cops can tell, you personally own and operate the TOR exit node that the traffic appears to have come from. You have no records of anyone else generating or being responsible for the traffic. If someone downloads kiddy porn through your TOR exit node, the only way the cops can tell it wasn't you is by searching your computing equipment for kiddy porn.
A router is not a TOR exit node. If illegal activities take place through a router, it doesn't look like the router is the origin of that traffic. TOR exit nodes, on the other hand, intentionally make it look like they ARE the origin of the illegal activity. In fact, that's the whole purpose of TOR. ISPs mostly just forward traffic from their customers, individual citizens mostly originate traffic. If an individual citizen is "providing communication services" through an intentionally obfuscated channel, they will be cleared of wrongdoing. But surely you don't expect them to be cleared with absolutely no investigation, do you?
That is not at all the same thing. Why would police want to go poking at the ISP in your example if there was no reason to believe the ISP had done anything? And even if they DID want to, how would they get a warrant to do so with no probable cause? As much as people would like to believe that running a TOR exit node makes them an ISP, the technical and practical realities mean that at least at the start, YOU are going to be suspected of any wrongdoing going through your node. The legal system will protect you eventually (as it did in this case), but you're running a service that, by design, makes it look like a bunch of strangers' Internet traffic is coming from your computer. If police want to investigate that traffic and you tell them "sorry, I'm just running TOR" and they just take your word for it and go away...that would be some pretty incompetent police work. Running and exit node is legally protected, but expecting it to be totally hassle free is just silly.
Those attacks also work just as well on ANY encryption product, it is not a weakness specific to Truecrypt or any other whole disk encryption program. Being able to read RAM through firewire or read old values after the computer is turned off and back on is a fundamental weakness of modern computer systems that encryption software can't really solve.
True, but it's not like there aren't points of failure for locally hosted data. "Cloud" services seem like a good choice for many businesses because it greatly decreases the amount of IT a business has to manage. And when it comes right down to it, a reliable Internet connection is almost certainly a requirement for a business IT setup no matter WHERE their data is hosted.
Because these kinds of errors AREN'T indicative of the standard by which scientific evidence is being gathered. That's the whole point. This is ONE example of bad scientific process among thousands of good examples, but people who are either stupid or have an agenda (or both) will view this as the normal way things are done. As for your second question, science should be placed on a pedestal as long as it's good science. Pedestal placement is all relative, and the reason good science should be given way more credence than the alternative is that the alternative is a bunch of ideas being pushed by people with NO evidence and biased political motivation. Does the IPCC make mistakes? Yup. But as long as the alternative is Bill O'Reilly and not other scientists with better data and methods, I think I'm still going to listen to the IPCC.
And yet I can still think of several ways to get information out of that office, including obvious things like memorizing information, copying it (by hand) onto paper you brought into the office yourself, and printing secret things with normal looking first pages.
Technology is never the solution to the problem of insiders. It might make it HARDER to steal information, but honestly, you can't run a business with non-trusted insiders. Technology has a place keeping people inside the company from information they shouldn't have (like keep engineers out of HR records), but preventing people from stealing information they need access to in order to do their jobs? Forget about it...
Don't forget the millions of Americans who will be even more likely to treat every Muslim, or every person who conforms to Muslim stereotypes, as a terrorist. There are tons of them commenting on this very story. Far from seeing them as the enemy, terrorists must LOVE these folks. It deepens the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, even so far as to gain additional support for the terrorists.
Popularity doesn't equal accuracy, especially in the news field. It often seems like the majority of people explicitly DON'T want "right" news, they want news that supports what they already believe. I'll leave that to you to decide what that says about the "competition crushing" Fox News is engaging in.
Even if that were true, which it's not, it doesn't really mean anything. Even if 100% of terrorists were Muslim, you still have all the problems the GP outlined. There is still no easy way to identify someone as Muslim, especially if they are trying to hide their beliefs. It's still grossly unconstitutional to single people out by religion. And most importantly, you are STILL persecuting a group of people, the vast, VAST majority of whom are innocent, in an attempt to find a few bad guys.
Wow, that's pretty stupid. Attackers who are captured alive can give further information, while dead ones can't. Maybe he was a lone nut, but maybe not. But I'm sure making you feel like Jack Bauer is totally worth not potentially preventing other attacks.
I see a lot of flaws in your logic, but perhaps the biggest one is that you are focusing on POLITICIANS and ignoring actual scientists. While it makes a great talking point, in the end, what Al Gore thinks or believes has no bearing on whether or not AGW is true or false.
He DID commit a crime in a foreign country. He hacked into US computers located on US soil. The fact that the Internet makes it easier to attack a foreign entity from your own country shouldn't matter. We wouldn't be having this discussion if this guy had managed to build a missile and hit the Pentagon from the UK.
So despite living in a country completely dominated by Christian beliefs, to the point where even HINTING that a Presidential candidate isn't Christian is a viable campaign tactic, some people (such as the parent) will insist that Christians are persecuted and looked down on for their beliefs. For people who hold religious beliefs that are ACTUALLY in the minority, this is incredibly irritating and not a little bit self-promoting. And it's worth noting that a post filled with whining and putting words into other peoples' mouths, despite predictions of getting "modded into oblivion" is actually 3: Insightful as I post this.
Only if you believe that male voting behavior is tied to masculinity. And while I know plenty of conservatives who insist that it is, I'm not sure there is a lot of proof to back up that belief. In any case, I'm fairly sure that any "widening gap between rural and city...voting" would apply equally to men and women. Rural folks in general tend to be more conservative across the board, suggesting the environment is the main factor.
Because most every culture mandates that children be raised by their parents, regardless of their competency in the role, nature versus nurture (genes, versus environment) is almost a moot argument. Fools do produce and raise more children, and have a higher chance of raising them to be fools be it due to bad genes or an ignorant upbringing in spite of good genes.
Citation needed on the "fools produce more children". Watching Idiocricy does not count as research, is there really any scientific study that says stupid people have more kids, or more importantly, that kids of "fools" end up as "fools" themselves.
Except a business, "big" or not, is run with the goal of getting profits. Who profits from a school getting a bigger chunk of the budget pie?
Schools wanting money isn't evil, it's what they need to educate students.
I think you're right about the "attitude" people are looking for. The problem is that the new news sources are selling themselves on playing to their readers/viewers, and people eat it up so much that they don't notice the incredible lack of quality in the actual information being presented. Slashdot, Fark and Bill O'Reilly are replacing the New York Times, Washington Post and Edward R. Murrow? That's a dramatic drop in the quality of news, all in the name of being more democratic.
You express the basic problem in your own post...you think it's BAD that news sources act like they have information we don't have. Of course they act that way, because they DO have information we don't have...that's what makes them good news sources. We're trading that for "news" any random gomer can present because that doesn't make us feel stupid? Not a good trade, if you ask me.
Not everyone...but most people. In any case, the counter-example isn't that there are people who dislike Obama who aren't conservative, the counter-example is that there are conservatives who apply the same pro-executive authority viewpoint to Obama that they did to Bush. And while I am willing to agree that not all Obama haters are conservative, I do NOT think there are very many conservatives out there who give Obama the free "he's the President" pass that they spent 8 years using to excuse Bush's bullshit.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but why are the people who don't agree with anthropogenic global warming theory throwing a party over this story? It's about a new climate model that, if it's accurate, says CO2 emissions may raise temperatures slightly less than previously thought. 2/3 of the predicted temperature range lies within the range predicted by the IPCC in 2007. The very best interpretation of this data from a "skeptic" point of view is that AGW is even better supported with evidence, with only the exact impact being refined. This definitely doesn't look to me like evidence that AGW theory is alarmist, un-scientific FUD.
Except the cops aren't going to put a cop of every corner and write down every plate because it would be way too manpower intensive. And people know that, so they have a reasonable expectation that their movements won't be tracked by the police without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Technology makes casual surveillance so much easier that the cops can and will track your every move in public even if they have absolutely no reason to do so. In other words, technology isn't simply the next generation of something that police are already doing, it allows a much different surveillance approach that is more invasive than what was practical before. The law needs to control that kind of thing in a way that simply wasn't necessary before.
No, the encryption ISN'T completely broken. If I have an encryption system that uses passwords for security, and you guess my password, the security is broken for this instance of the system...but I can just pick another password and security is restored. "Security through obscurity" doesn't mean security based on ANY secret, it means security through secrecy in some fundamental element of the system, especially when such a secret makes the system brittle. If you steal my key, I can simply rekey a lock and I'm just as secure as before. But if I ALWAYS leave a spare key in the same spot, once you figure that out the entire system is fundamentally broken. That's security through obscurity.
IP addresses don't definitively identify individuals (and I'm not aware of any case where that alone was used to convict someone), but disallowing their use as probable cause for a search warrant would seem to set an unreasonably high legal bar.
I imagine a better solution would be to get a virtual or dedicated server at some hosting company, clearly labeled as a TOR exit node (have it host a webpage explaining that fact) and if you can, ONLY use it for that. If you set up a separate corporate entity that owns the server, even better. The law protects you no matter where you run the exit node, but if you want to avoid even being personally investigated at all, you definitely need some significant separation between your home and your exit node.
I imagine it's easier for hosting companies because they aren't the prime suspects of whatever the crime is, they're simply assisting the investigation. The person running a TOR exit node IS the prime suspect, because of how TOR works. A hosting company has records and logs of who's using what, a history of helping in police investigations and not being the guilty party. But as far as the cops can tell, you personally own and operate the TOR exit node that the traffic appears to have come from. You have no records of anyone else generating or being responsible for the traffic. If someone downloads kiddy porn through your TOR exit node, the only way the cops can tell it wasn't you is by searching your computing equipment for kiddy porn.
A router is not a TOR exit node. If illegal activities take place through a router, it doesn't look like the router is the origin of that traffic. TOR exit nodes, on the other hand, intentionally make it look like they ARE the origin of the illegal activity. In fact, that's the whole purpose of TOR. ISPs mostly just forward traffic from their customers, individual citizens mostly originate traffic. If an individual citizen is "providing communication services" through an intentionally obfuscated channel, they will be cleared of wrongdoing. But surely you don't expect them to be cleared with absolutely no investigation, do you?
That is not at all the same thing. Why would police want to go poking at the ISP in your example if there was no reason to believe the ISP had done anything? And even if they DID want to, how would they get a warrant to do so with no probable cause? As much as people would like to believe that running a TOR exit node makes them an ISP, the technical and practical realities mean that at least at the start, YOU are going to be suspected of any wrongdoing going through your node. The legal system will protect you eventually (as it did in this case), but you're running a service that, by design, makes it look like a bunch of strangers' Internet traffic is coming from your computer. If police want to investigate that traffic and you tell them "sorry, I'm just running TOR" and they just take your word for it and go away...that would be some pretty incompetent police work. Running and exit node is legally protected, but expecting it to be totally hassle free is just silly.
Those attacks also work just as well on ANY encryption product, it is not a weakness specific to Truecrypt or any other whole disk encryption program. Being able to read RAM through firewire or read old values after the computer is turned off and back on is a fundamental weakness of modern computer systems that encryption software can't really solve.
True, but it's not like there aren't points of failure for locally hosted data. "Cloud" services seem like a good choice for many businesses because it greatly decreases the amount of IT a business has to manage. And when it comes right down to it, a reliable Internet connection is almost certainly a requirement for a business IT setup no matter WHERE their data is hosted.
Because these kinds of errors AREN'T indicative of the standard by which scientific evidence is being gathered. That's the whole point. This is ONE example of bad scientific process among thousands of good examples, but people who are either stupid or have an agenda (or both) will view this as the normal way things are done. As for your second question, science should be placed on a pedestal as long as it's good science. Pedestal placement is all relative, and the reason good science should be given way more credence than the alternative is that the alternative is a bunch of ideas being pushed by people with NO evidence and biased political motivation. Does the IPCC make mistakes? Yup. But as long as the alternative is Bill O'Reilly and not other scientists with better data and methods, I think I'm still going to listen to the IPCC.
Technology is never the solution to the problem of insiders. It might make it HARDER to steal information, but honestly, you can't run a business with non-trusted insiders. Technology has a place keeping people inside the company from information they shouldn't have (like keep engineers out of HR records), but preventing people from stealing information they need access to in order to do their jobs? Forget about it...
Don't forget the millions of Americans who will be even more likely to treat every Muslim, or every person who conforms to Muslim stereotypes, as a terrorist. There are tons of them commenting on this very story. Far from seeing them as the enemy, terrorists must LOVE these folks. It deepens the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, even so far as to gain additional support for the terrorists.
Also...seriously, "state-run media"?
Most generic middle eastern/Muslim folks don't bring down airplanes either.
Even if that were true, which it's not, it doesn't really mean anything. Even if 100% of terrorists were Muslim, you still have all the problems the GP outlined. There is still no easy way to identify someone as Muslim, especially if they are trying to hide their beliefs. It's still grossly unconstitutional to single people out by religion. And most importantly, you are STILL persecuting a group of people, the vast, VAST majority of whom are innocent, in an attempt to find a few bad guys.
Wow, that's pretty stupid. Attackers who are captured alive can give further information, while dead ones can't. Maybe he was a lone nut, but maybe not. But I'm sure making you feel like Jack Bauer is totally worth not potentially preventing other attacks.
I see a lot of flaws in your logic, but perhaps the biggest one is that you are focusing on POLITICIANS and ignoring actual scientists. While it makes a great talking point, in the end, what Al Gore thinks or believes has no bearing on whether or not AGW is true or false.
He DID commit a crime in a foreign country. He hacked into US computers located on US soil. The fact that the Internet makes it easier to attack a foreign entity from your own country shouldn't matter. We wouldn't be having this discussion if this guy had managed to build a missile and hit the Pentagon from the UK.
So despite living in a country completely dominated by Christian beliefs, to the point where even HINTING that a Presidential candidate isn't Christian is a viable campaign tactic, some people (such as the parent) will insist that Christians are persecuted and looked down on for their beliefs. For people who hold religious beliefs that are ACTUALLY in the minority, this is incredibly irritating and not a little bit self-promoting. And it's worth noting that a post filled with whining and putting words into other peoples' mouths, despite predictions of getting "modded into oblivion" is actually 3: Insightful as I post this.
Only if you believe that male voting behavior is tied to masculinity. And while I know plenty of conservatives who insist that it is, I'm not sure there is a lot of proof to back up that belief. In any case, I'm fairly sure that any "widening gap between rural and city...voting" would apply equally to men and women. Rural folks in general tend to be more conservative across the board, suggesting the environment is the main factor.
Because most every culture mandates that children be raised by their parents, regardless of their competency in the role, nature versus nurture (genes, versus environment) is almost a moot argument. Fools do produce and raise more children, and have a higher chance of raising them to be fools be it due to bad genes or an ignorant upbringing in spite of good genes.
Citation needed on the "fools produce more children". Watching Idiocricy does not count as research, is there really any scientific study that says stupid people have more kids, or more importantly, that kids of "fools" end up as "fools" themselves.
Except a business, "big" or not, is run with the goal of getting profits. Who profits from a school getting a bigger chunk of the budget pie? Schools wanting money isn't evil, it's what they need to educate students.
I think you're right about the "attitude" people are looking for. The problem is that the new news sources are selling themselves on playing to their readers/viewers, and people eat it up so much that they don't notice the incredible lack of quality in the actual information being presented. Slashdot, Fark and Bill O'Reilly are replacing the New York Times, Washington Post and Edward R. Murrow? That's a dramatic drop in the quality of news, all in the name of being more democratic. You express the basic problem in your own post...you think it's BAD that news sources act like they have information we don't have. Of course they act that way, because they DO have information we don't have...that's what makes them good news sources. We're trading that for "news" any random gomer can present because that doesn't make us feel stupid? Not a good trade, if you ask me.
Not everyone...but most people. In any case, the counter-example isn't that there are people who dislike Obama who aren't conservative, the counter-example is that there are conservatives who apply the same pro-executive authority viewpoint to Obama that they did to Bush. And while I am willing to agree that not all Obama haters are conservative, I do NOT think there are very many conservatives out there who give Obama the free "he's the President" pass that they spent 8 years using to excuse Bush's bullshit.