Energy produced = volume of water flowing * square of the distance drop, cut your vertical drop by 1/2, your power output drops to 25%.
Interesting corollary with the latest simulator findings on fusion power... it might break even at 26M amps input, it gets really interesting at 60M amps, and better and better from there. It doesn't work yet because we haven't made one big enough yet.
It's improving, slowly, but as the RFC says, the real solution is at the endpoints... you can only do so much in the middle with insecure endpoints.
Considering that webmail is becoming more prevalent than traditional mail clients. I don't think it matters too much where it's processed - Since it's all on the server because of webmail. I know for a fact that Yahoo won't accept mail from addresses unless they have at least SPF or DKIM records now.
Yeah, it's a pain to secure normal messages in web-mail, unless you attach the secure content in a file, or, more cleverly, stenographically encoded in a LOL-Catz image.
The real problem is that the current generation of internet users as a whole have moved into free houses stuffed with video cameras and microphones, which is what the cloud services are, basically.
As a result, people effectively have no rights, and if this isn't changed soon, we'll have a generation of people who are completely disenfranchised, and only exist at the whim of their "free" providers of services. This is not a good place to be.
You make it sound like slavery - a lot of slaves were better off working for their masters than as free men. The biggest problem with slavery was that the slaves didn't have the right to choose. We do have the right to choose what we share and how we share it.
If you don't want your kid's birthing video to go viral, don't post it, or share it in copyable form with anyone who is likely to post it. Thing is, there are a LOT of people who actually do want their kid's birthing video to go viral.
"Maybe not necessary, but as it has always been implemented, SMTP, IMAP, POP and otherwise, it is stored on each server while they wait to copy it to the next server, and it is stored for a long time on the receiving server waiting for the final (usually human) recipient to acknowledge receipt and request deletion - I have always set my clients to automatically delete received messages after 15 days, during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system."
But this is transient storage, just as the mail bin is, in my example. There is nothing about recording copies that is "inherent" in this technology. The kind of recording you are talking about requires a copy, such as in a database somewhere. None of the technologies we are talking about require copies in order to operate.
The problem with your argument is that the digital senders haven't even taken the time to put their content in an envelope. I'm sure there are technologies that can X-ray or otherwise scan a sealed envelope and determine what's written on the paper without physically opening it, but they're expensive and slow and rarely, if at all, used on paper mail, certainly not indiscriminately.
By comparison, any first year computer science student can write a string matching algorithm, and that's all it takes to scan "digital mail" that hasn't had a crypto-wrapper put on it. Just the act of ROT-13ing your message would thwart most scanners, because it's not frequently done and they wouldn't know to look for it. A simple 32 bit open-key cypher would be cost-prohibitive to crack on every passing e-mail, but people just don't bother, instead they play lawyer with crap like:
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. This material may contain ITAR (22 CFR 120) controlled information. The transfer, dissemination or disclosure of this information to any non-US person or company without the required license approved by the United States DDTC is prohibited under federal law. If you have received this email in error, notify the sender immediately. Please note that any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the company.
on a freaking un-encrypted message! It's like the old analogy of walking down the street with hundred dollar bills cello-taped all over the back of your jacket. Sure, nobody is supposed to take them, but come on! And, reading the mail doesn't even "hurt" the message, it's delivered 100% un-altered, and worse, you will never know if it has been read.
"... during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system."
Depends on your ISP, but probably not. Besides, if you are using an email account that is given to you by your ISP, you're kind of asking for trouble, aren't you?
Huh? You would use an ISP that doesn't do backups, not even once a week? With strong end-to-end encryption, it wouldn't matter who we use for an ISP, without it, you're just kidding yourself if you think your message is secure just because you control one server in the delivery chain.
"Know anybody who uses digital signatures or PGP in regular e-mail conversations? I know exactly one, a geek celebrity who presumably doesn't want people making up quotes attributed to him."
That's a straw-man argument. Let's remember what my post was about: somebody said that "recording" was "inherent" in the technology, and I pointed out that it wasn't. Your statement about the RFC changes that not one bit. The fact that I might leave my door unlocked does not mean that burglary is "inherent"
No, I haven't, at least not live. But that's not really the point, because the dubious thing here isn't the Street View car itself, it's the fact that the Street View system lets other people see things without ever physically being present at all.
Maybe I'm a voyeur at heart, but I think that's a good thing. I used to do my own drive-by scouting for various reasons (potential real-estate purchase, for one) and I always will get "ground truth" before closing a deal, but Street View allows me to do a quick scout of more, and more diverse, territory in less time, burning less fuel.
If you're upset about "people seeing things," be upset about the tax collectors that have been flying at low altitude over your home for the last 50 years taking "tax assessment photographs," which have always been available for public viewing at the assessors office, long before the internet.
"Facebook could work quite well as an encrypted, strongly private system."
Facebook is basically a giant marketing data collecting tool. Without the ability to collect your data how exactly could Facebook work?
Sorry, I meant to say "work for the users," how the owners of this new, privacy respecting Facebook like system make money is a little less obvious... I'd say it's one of the problems with today's Internet that still needs to be solved: how to make money without exploiting your user's private data.
it's not like it cannot evolve in the unpleasant direction much faster than 30 years
True, hopefully the US has enough checks and balances to reverse the unpleasant direction (which I feel we have been moving slowly in for 30 years now) before it gets too bad.
Now, I just know that someone will jump in and talk about how this is all just the natural order of things, how computers are "growing up" and becoming more organized and how we must follow the same pattern that we always follow and how people are not generally capable of figuring out how to use PGP or OTR or ABP...
I think the year was 1997 or so, I got the idea that e-mail clients sucked and I could do better. Automatically displayed photo attachments were the latest gee-whiz feature. I bought a (physical) book on SMTP protocol, and promptly got distracted by something else...
At the time, I thought a popular, free, e-mail client with easy to use built-in support for PGP, might just gain enough traction to offer a "freemium" version like Eudora was doing. Who knows, if I had actually delivered it, I could have changed the world. It's still out there, up for grabs, IMHO most e-mail software still sucks. Today I'd go at it with Qt - a nice slick Quick interface, cross platform at launch. All I need is about $2M in funding and I think it's got a chance - think Kickstarter can swing that?/jest
I suspect some of the most secure servers out there are run privately, from dorm rooms, etc. Of course, we don't know about them because they're, well, private.
Maybe after 10 or 20 years of GeoCities/MySpace/Facebook, somebody will launch a similar useful site with real security and privacy built into it from the start - the trick will be getting investors to believe that the business model can work, since everything that's made big visible money on the Internet so far has depended on insane traffic volumes driving advertising revenue. The private site will, by design, carry much less traffic and grow much more slowly.
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card,
Not exactly. It's more like a letter with a very thin envelope. It takes a minimal amount of effort to read, but it can't just land in front of you so you read it on accident. A mail server admin still has to intentionally read the email.
You have a legal expectation of privacy for a letter. This is separate from how easily your privacy could be illegally violated.
The BBS system I ran in 1985 echoed every single character typed by the user to the server screen, passwords and all. Most BBS software was like that at the time. Modern e-mail moves by in such torrential floods that you might expect some privacy from the sheer volume of other mail moving along with yours, but at any number of points along the way, the stream of characters that is your e-mail can be displayed "for diagnostic purposes" by the simplest of equipment or software.
If you want a thin envelope, use encryption - something based on AACS would make a humorous political statement, most famously illegal to decrypt, but most 8 year olds who know how to use Google can figure it out.
Companies have always sought to find information on us,
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
Companies have always sought to find information on us,
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
I worked for a company that made a very technically complex product, it cost, all told, $600 to make, and sold for $15K, yet, the company barely broke even. Why? Because it cost $14,400 per device to successfully market and sell one - they sold tens of thousands per year, shipped a FedEx truck full of promotional materials out every single day, and had hundreds of sales reps beating the bushes to find "the next customer."
For many companies "advertising" and potential customer information are simply, everything.
"All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail."
Not at all. First, it isn't "inherently recorded", any more than your snail mail is "inherently copied" when it is put in a bin at the post office.
Maybe not necessary, but as it has always been implemented, SMTP, IMAP, POP and otherwise, it is stored on each server while they wait to copy it to the next server, and it is stored for a long time on the receiving server waiting for the final (usually human) recipient to acknowledge receipt and request deletion - I have always set my clients to automatically delete received messages after 15 days, during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system.
To sum it up: there is no real sense in which electronic communications are "inherently recorded" by any middleman, at all, any more than a telephone conversation, unless you count temporary storage, which should be set up as just that... temporary, and wiped when a file is deleted.
Have a look through: RFC5321 and predecessors, those are the rules your e-mail travels under, whether or not they should be amended to ensure privacy is another debate, this is the way things have worked in e-mail for 30 years. Nothing guarantees privacy, an obliquely related quote from the transport standard:
SMTP mail inherently cannot be authenticated, or
integrity checks provided, at the transport level. Real mail
security lies only in end-to-end methods involving the message
bodies, such as those that use digital signatures (see RFC 1847 [43]
and, e.g., Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) in RFC 4880 [44] or Secure/
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) in RFC 3851 [45]).
Know anybody who uses digital signatures or PGP in regular e-mail conversations? I know exactly one, a geek celebrity who presumably doesn't want people making up quotes attributed to him.
"Similarly for GPS tracking, that's just like old-school tailing a car, but cheaper and more clandestine - what's not to like?"
And this is yet another false argument. GPS tracking is, indeed, inherently worse and more intrusive than an "old-school tail", in several ways. Thankfully the courts, unlike you, have recognized this fact.
If you didn't recognize the sarcasm, I apologize... "What's not to like" comes from the perspective of people who "do" law enforcement, and, thankfully, in January of this year, SCOTUS came out on our side for once.
None of the basic issues have changed. Emails need be no different from telephone conversations. Nor internet sessions. ISPs could (and should) operate like common carriers, such as the old-school telephone companies. That would solve much, right there. Many of these privacy issues would disappear overnight.
Old school telephone lines could be, and were regularly, tapped, with and without warrants - information gained from a warrantless wiretap can not be used to prosecute nor get a warrant, but it certainly did happen. Open and publicly auditable police protection isn't likely to come about any time soon, we certainly have never had it in the past.
E-mail needs to grow up, I use G-mail because it serves my needs, and my needs do not include private e-mail conversation.
What I find horrifying is the security theater that goes around supposedly "sensitive" information handling. Footers on unencrypted e-mails instructing the recipient to de
For one thing, the individual in the street can themselves be seen. Being in a public place is a two-way deal, and if you're going around peering in through people's windows, you're going to attract unwelcome attention.
Facebook, and similar concepts - including e-mail, need to grow up to address privacy concerns.
Facebook could work quite well as an encrypted, strongly private system. One big reason it's not is because that would have slowed adoption. Same for encrypted e-mail (plus, Google would feel bad about snooping encrypted e-mail, so Gmail won't do it.)
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
No, it's more like your mail carrier reading your snail-mail.
Which is also an illegal invasion of privacy.
The rules don't need to be re-written. The old ones work just fine as long as we don't throw out all reason as soon as "on a computer" is added.
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card, if you want a sealed letter, you need to use crypto - even ROT-13 is some measure of privacy. It seemed reasonable enough, the BBSs I used (and ran) in the 1980s were open like that and you could pretty much assume that the sysop knew everything you typed, including your password.
Even in the mid 1990s, ISP e-mail was handled on systems that pretty much resembled BBSs, my first dialup ISP was a couple of servers in some guy's garage. It rapidly grew into mass virtual machines in clusters on server farms, but the lack of privacy implications remain - if somebody wants to look, it's all too easy to do.
The problem is that far to many people look about as far ahead as a goldfish. "Sure I will give you access to all my facebook data for a cheap beer..." And that makes it had for the rest of us with a clue.
Nothing hard there, they can have access to my Facebook data (I haven't logged in in over a year, and my 5 friends are more random than telling), I get a free beer and they get.... less than they expected, from me.
Idiots have been bragging about their crimes forever, most mob busts were based on (unintentional) confessions.
Wiretapping laws came about because wiretapping was seen as an invasion of privacy, you were in effect joining a real-time conversation that would not normally be recorded.
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
Similarly for GPS tracking, that's just like old-school tailing a car, but cheaper and more clandestine - what's not to like?
The rules need to be rewritten, give it 30 or 40 years and it should settle down, it's all still very new - judicial time runs much slower than internet time.
Agreed, but I feel like NASCAR/NHRA/most motorsports and experimental aviation also prescribe ridiculously small sandboxes to play in. There are good reasons for it, but still the restrictions are what define the endeavor, far more than any pure Physics of the problem being addressed.
By preserving the occasional "no gadgets allowed" zone, there is a preservation of the idea that the gadgets can be turned off (within social norms).
Certainly a physician with a cell-phone has the option to turn it off, but there is a social expectation that since they have it, it should be on and they should always be available - thus their choice to forgo them altogether rather than having yet another "on call leash."
Slashdot Mirror
Energy produced = volume of water flowing * square of the distance drop, cut your vertical drop by 1/2, your power output drops to 25%.
Interesting corollary with the latest simulator findings on fusion power... it might break even at 26M amps input, it gets really interesting at 60M amps, and better and better from there. It doesn't work yet because we haven't made one big enough yet.
Considering that webmail is becoming more prevalent than traditional mail clients. I don't think it matters too much where it's processed - Since it's all on the server because of webmail. I know for a fact that Yahoo won't accept mail from addresses unless they have at least SPF or DKIM records now.
Yeah, it's a pain to secure normal messages in web-mail, unless you attach the secure content in a file, or, more cleverly, stenographically encoded in a LOL-Catz image.
The real problem is that the current generation of internet users as a whole have moved into free houses stuffed with video cameras and microphones, which is what the cloud services are, basically.
As a result, people effectively have no rights, and if this isn't changed soon, we'll have a generation of people who are completely disenfranchised, and only exist at the whim of their "free" providers of services. This is not a good place to be.
You make it sound like slavery - a lot of slaves were better off working for their masters than as free men. The biggest problem with slavery was that the slaves didn't have the right to choose. We do have the right to choose what we share and how we share it.
If you don't want your kid's birthing video to go viral, don't post it, or share it in copyable form with anyone who is likely to post it. Thing is, there are a LOT of people who actually do want their kid's birthing video to go viral.
"Maybe not necessary, but as it has always been implemented, SMTP, IMAP, POP and otherwise, it is stored on each server while they wait to copy it to the next server, and it is stored for a long time on the receiving server waiting for the final (usually human) recipient to acknowledge receipt and request deletion - I have always set my clients to automatically delete received messages after 15 days, during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system."
But this is transient storage, just as the mail bin is, in my example. There is nothing about recording copies that is "inherent" in this technology. The kind of recording you are talking about requires a copy, such as in a database somewhere. None of the technologies we are talking about require copies in order to operate.
The problem with your argument is that the digital senders haven't even taken the time to put their content in an envelope. I'm sure there are technologies that can X-ray or otherwise scan a sealed envelope and determine what's written on the paper without physically opening it, but they're expensive and slow and rarely, if at all, used on paper mail, certainly not indiscriminately.
By comparison, any first year computer science student can write a string matching algorithm, and that's all it takes to scan "digital mail" that hasn't had a crypto-wrapper put on it. Just the act of ROT-13ing your message would thwart most scanners, because it's not frequently done and they wouldn't know to look for it. A simple 32 bit open-key cypher would be cost-prohibitive to crack on every passing e-mail, but people just don't bother, instead they play lawyer with crap like:
on a freaking un-encrypted message! It's like the old analogy of walking down the street with hundred dollar bills cello-taped all over the back of your jacket. Sure, nobody is supposed to take them, but come on! And, reading the mail doesn't even "hurt" the message, it's delivered 100% un-altered, and worse, you will never know if it has been read.
"... during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system."
Depends on your ISP, but probably not. Besides, if you are using an email account that is given to you by your ISP, you're kind of asking for trouble, aren't you?
Huh? You would use an ISP that doesn't do backups, not even once a week? With strong end-to-end encryption, it wouldn't matter who we use for an ISP, without it, you're just kidding yourself if you think your message is secure just because you control one server in the delivery chain.
"Know anybody who uses digital signatures or PGP in regular e-mail conversations? I know exactly one, a geek celebrity who presumably doesn't want people making up quotes attributed to him."
That's a straw-man argument. Let's remember what my post was about: somebody said that "recording" was "inherent" in the technology, and I pointed out that it wasn't. Your statement about the RFC changes that not one bit. The fact that I might leave my door unlocked does not mean that burglary is "inherent"
I feel for the jet-set, I really do, I used to travel for business 6-10 times a year.
I, and my family, haven't set foot in an airport since 2006, and we really don't miss it at all.
Let my UPS packages travel by jet, I'll take a car, thank you.
It's improving, slowly, but as the RFC says, the real solution is at the endpoints... you can only do so much in the middle with insecure endpoints.
No, I haven't, at least not live. But that's not really the point, because the dubious thing here isn't the Street View car itself, it's the fact that the Street View system lets other people see things without ever physically being present at all.
Maybe I'm a voyeur at heart, but I think that's a good thing. I used to do my own drive-by scouting for various reasons (potential real-estate purchase, for one) and I always will get "ground truth" before closing a deal, but Street View allows me to do a quick scout of more, and more diverse, territory in less time, burning less fuel.
If you're upset about "people seeing things," be upset about the tax collectors that have been flying at low altitude over your home for the last 50 years taking "tax assessment photographs," which have always been available for public viewing at the assessors office, long before the internet.
Agreed... however, it's a sad fact of life that only 16 year olds have enough free time to do stuff like this.
So, let's start complaining about this after unemployment is below 2%.
...and people are willing to leave the unemployment rolls for personal servant wages.
Pay personal servants better than what they get with welfare and free time, and they will.
Nursing sucks, but the pay isn't bad and you can pretty much work wherever, whenever you choose.
"Facebook could work quite well as an encrypted, strongly private system."
Facebook is basically a giant marketing data collecting tool. Without the ability to collect your data how exactly could Facebook work?
Sorry, I meant to say "work for the users," how the owners of this new, privacy respecting Facebook like system make money is a little less obvious... I'd say it's one of the problems with today's Internet that still needs to be solved: how to make money without exploiting your user's private data.
it's not like it cannot evolve in the unpleasant direction much faster than 30 years
True, hopefully the US has enough checks and balances to reverse the unpleasant direction (which I feel we have been moving slowly in for 30 years now) before it gets too bad.
Now, I just know that someone will jump in and talk about how this is all just the natural order of things, how computers are "growing up" and becoming more organized and how we must follow the same pattern that we always follow and how people are not generally capable of figuring out how to use PGP or OTR or ABP...
I think the year was 1997 or so, I got the idea that e-mail clients sucked and I could do better. Automatically displayed photo attachments were the latest gee-whiz feature. I bought a (physical) book on SMTP protocol, and promptly got distracted by something else...
At the time, I thought a popular, free, e-mail client with easy to use built-in support for PGP, might just gain enough traction to offer a "freemium" version like Eudora was doing. Who knows, if I had actually delivered it, I could have changed the world. It's still out there, up for grabs, IMHO most e-mail software still sucks. Today I'd go at it with Qt - a nice slick Quick interface, cross platform at launch. All I need is about $2M in funding and I think it's got a chance - think Kickstarter can swing that? /jest
I suspect some of the most secure servers out there are run privately, from dorm rooms, etc. Of course, we don't know about them because they're, well, private.
Maybe after 10 or 20 years of GeoCities/MySpace/Facebook, somebody will launch a similar useful site with real security and privacy built into it from the start - the trick will be getting investors to believe that the business model can work, since everything that's made big visible money on the Internet so far has depended on insane traffic volumes driving advertising revenue. The private site will, by design, carry much less traffic and grow much more slowly.
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card,
Not exactly. It's more like a letter with a very thin envelope. It takes a minimal amount of effort to read, but it can't just land in front of you so you read it on accident. A mail server admin still has to intentionally read the email.
You have a legal expectation of privacy for a letter. This is separate from how easily your privacy could be illegally violated.
The BBS system I ran in 1985 echoed every single character typed by the user to the server screen, passwords and all. Most BBS software was like that at the time. Modern e-mail moves by in such torrential floods that you might expect some privacy from the sheer volume of other mail moving along with yours, but at any number of points along the way, the stream of characters that is your e-mail can be displayed "for diagnostic purposes" by the simplest of equipment or software.
If you want a thin envelope, use encryption - something based on AACS would make a humorous political statement, most famously illegal to decrypt, but most 8 year olds who know how to use Google can figure it out.
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
I disagree. This is pervasive only due to advertising. If you put aside the requirements of advertising, you'll find that companies have very little need for information about their customers, basically they just need enough to make a transaction work, an address only if something must be sent or delivered, and credit card data if it's not going to be a cash transaction.
So the evil ultimately resides in the needs of advertising, and the solution lies in making companies accountable for their activities.
I worked for a company that made a very technically complex product, it cost, all told, $600 to make, and sold for $15K, yet, the company barely broke even. Why? Because it cost $14,400 per device to successfully market and sell one - they sold tens of thousands per year, shipped a FedEx truck full of promotional materials out every single day, and had hundreds of sales reps beating the bushes to find "the next customer."
For many companies "advertising" and potential customer information are simply, everything.
"All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail."
Not at all. First, it isn't "inherently recorded", any more than your snail mail is "inherently copied" when it is put in a bin at the post office.
Maybe not necessary, but as it has always been implemented, SMTP, IMAP, POP and otherwise, it is stored on each server while they wait to copy it to the next server, and it is stored for a long time on the receiving server waiting for the final (usually human) recipient to acknowledge receipt and request deletion - I have always set my clients to automatically delete received messages after 15 days, during which time, I assume that my ISP is backing the, almost always unencrypted, e-mail up on their disaster recovery system.
To sum it up: there is no real sense in which electronic communications are "inherently recorded" by any middleman, at all, any more than a telephone conversation, unless you count temporary storage, which should be set up as just that... temporary, and wiped when a file is deleted.
Have a look through: RFC5321 and predecessors, those are the rules your e-mail travels under, whether or not they should be amended to ensure privacy is another debate, this is the way things have worked in e-mail for 30 years. Nothing guarantees privacy, an obliquely related quote from the transport standard:
Know anybody who uses digital signatures or PGP in regular e-mail conversations? I know exactly one, a geek celebrity who presumably doesn't want people making up quotes attributed to him.
"Similarly for GPS tracking, that's just like old-school tailing a car, but cheaper and more clandestine - what's not to like?"
And this is yet another false argument. GPS tracking is, indeed, inherently worse and more intrusive than an "old-school tail", in several ways. Thankfully the courts, unlike you, have recognized this fact.
If you didn't recognize the sarcasm, I apologize... "What's not to like" comes from the perspective of people who "do" law enforcement, and, thankfully, in January of this year, SCOTUS came out on our side for once.
None of the basic issues have changed. Emails need be no different from telephone conversations. Nor internet sessions. ISPs could (and should) operate like common carriers, such as the old-school telephone companies. That would solve much, right there. Many of these privacy issues would disappear overnight.
Old school telephone lines could be, and were regularly, tapped, with and without warrants - information gained from a warrantless wiretap can not be used to prosecute nor get a warrant, but it certainly did happen. Open and publicly auditable police protection isn't likely to come about any time soon, we certainly have never had it in the past.
E-mail needs to grow up, I use G-mail because it serves my needs, and my needs do not include private e-mail conversation.
What I find horrifying is the security theater that goes around supposedly "sensitive" information handling. Footers on unencrypted e-mails instructing the recipient to de
For one thing, the individual in the street can themselves be seen. Being in a public place is a two-way deal, and if you're going around peering in through people's windows, you're going to attract unwelcome attention.
Have you ever seen a Google Street View car?
Facebook, and similar concepts - including e-mail, need to grow up to address privacy concerns.
Facebook could work quite well as an encrypted, strongly private system. One big reason it's not is because that would have slowed adoption. Same for encrypted e-mail (plus, Google would feel bad about snooping encrypted e-mail, so Gmail won't do it.)
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
No, it's more like your mail carrier reading your snail-mail.
Which is also an illegal invasion of privacy.
The rules don't need to be re-written. The old ones work just fine as long as we don't throw out all reason as soon as "on a computer" is added.
When I started using e-mail (early 1990s), I and everyone I e-mailed with understood that e-mail is not a sealed letter, it is a post card, if you want a sealed letter, you need to use crypto - even ROT-13 is some measure of privacy. It seemed reasonable enough, the BBSs I used (and ran) in the 1980s were open like that and you could pretty much assume that the sysop knew everything you typed, including your password.
Even in the mid 1990s, ISP e-mail was handled on systems that pretty much resembled BBSs, my first dialup ISP was a couple of servers in some guy's garage. It rapidly grew into mass virtual machines in clusters on server farms, but the lack of privacy implications remain - if somebody wants to look, it's all too easy to do.
In an effort to find the needle, we're burning down the haystack.
I might add that burning down a haystack to find a needle in it not only destroys the hay, but makes the needle useless..
Useless, or harmless? There are those who would see the disempowered needle as a victory (they don't care about hay, anyway.)
The problem is that far to many people look about as far ahead as a goldfish. "Sure I will give you access to all my facebook data for a cheap beer..." And that makes it had for the rest of us with a clue.
Nothing hard there, they can have access to my Facebook data (I haven't logged in in over a year, and my 5 friends are more random than telling), I get a free beer and they get.... less than they expected, from me.
Idiots have been bragging about their crimes forever, most mob busts were based on (unintentional) confessions.
Wiretapping laws came about because wiretapping was seen as an invasion of privacy, you were in effect joining a real-time conversation that would not normally be recorded.
All digital communication is inherently recorded, so in some twisted sense it's more like dumpster diving and less like wiretapping to snoop in e-mail.
Similarly for GPS tracking, that's just like old-school tailing a car, but cheaper and more clandestine - what's not to like?
The rules need to be rewritten, give it 30 or 40 years and it should settle down, it's all still very new - judicial time runs much slower than internet time.
Agreed, but I feel like NASCAR/NHRA/most motorsports and experimental aviation also prescribe ridiculously small sandboxes to play in. There are good reasons for it, but still the restrictions are what define the endeavor, far more than any pure Physics of the problem being addressed.
By preserving the occasional "no gadgets allowed" zone, there is a preservation of the idea that the gadgets can be turned off (within social norms).
Certainly a physician with a cell-phone has the option to turn it off, but there is a social expectation that since they have it, it should be on and they should always be available - thus their choice to forgo them altogether rather than having yet another "on call leash."
No, but "curing all disability" is a pretty sweeping generalization that ignores the shades of grey that exist.