Really, as long as only "reasonable technical assistance" is required, there is no danger. Good encryption is designed to be (practically) unbreakable unless the key is known, hence expecting somebody to break it without the key is not "reasonable" at all.
The four digit passcode on an iPhone is "safe enough" because only software signed by Apple can take a passcode and try to use it to unlock a phone, and the Apple-signed software on your iPhone doesn't allow a practical brute force attack. Apple could however create its own software to do a brute force attack if they have your iPhone and crack it, which they used to do if the police handed them a warrant and a phone (doesn't work with random eight digit or mixed digit/letter code because it takes too long). Apparently Apple changed this system so even Apple cannot brute force your iPhone anymore.
The court actually _can_ order you to decrypt a device (not cracking the decryption because most people wouldn't have the slightest clue how to do it) in most cases, except when the fact that you can decrypt it is by itself incriminating you. (So if unlocking an iPhone, showing the judge that it is unlocked, and locking it again without letting anyone access it would incriminate you, then you can't be required to unlock it). The rest of your argument is perfectly fine.
[1] OK, here's my rant. Programmers do not understand the value of good documentation. If you look at really good projects they have great documentation. If I can not find documentation for a software package or it is in poor shape I simply do not use the software. Esp. in this short term sprint oriented era I do not have time to waste fumbling around trying to get something to work. If it isn't function OOTB in less than I day I do not have time for it. End of story.
Programmers _do_ understand the value of good documentation. Well, most of them. They just don't like creating it.
"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."
I'd love to see exactly which law Tower Records would have been violating (the case seems quite old, since Tower Records went bankrupt in 2006). It would have been hugely unpopular and there would been a huge drop in sales, but I very much doubt that it would violate any laws.
Comparing the bill of materials with the retail price and claiming the difference is "markup" just demonstrates that you have not the slightest clue about economics and should never, ever be allowed to run a shop.
I've driven thousands of kilometers on the German Autobahn. The safety issue is not so much the speed relative to the ground, but the speed relative to other drivers. If you're going 170kph in the left lane in your BMW, and grandma in her 1990 Volkswagen swerves left to overtake a truck, you've got pretty limited distance to slow down (at high speed)..
Another interesting part of traffic laws: You must be prepared for people making mistakes. So if you see grandma slowly approaching that truck, you must take into account that she might switch right into your lane and drive accordingly.
Apart from long stretches with explicit speed limit signs, there's also the fact that if you are involved in an accident at over 80mph, it is assumed that it was your fault unless you can prove that the accident would have happened at lower speed as well. And there is the general rule that you mustn't drive faster than road condition.
Since US and German driving were compared, German police is really tough on tailgating. You will see cameras on motorways, they don't measure speed but the distance between cars. The correct distance is speed in km/h, divided by 2, as meters. Less than half that can get you a ticket (25 mtrs and 100 km/h = 62mph). Even less distance gives serious fines and can be a criminal offence.
The trick is, what's a real threat, what's not? What's defamatory, what's not?
The question here isn't really whether it is a "real threat" or not. (Although if it is a real threat then the police needs to go out and arrest the guy, this is not a matter of "freedom of speech", it is a matter of preventing a murder). The question is whether the speech is damaging to the victim. And a death threat is absolutely without any doubt damaging. Seriously, that's why the death threat is being made, to cause damage to the victim.
I'd say a good law change would be to state that when a death threat is made, and the victim of the death threat kills the person threatening them in any way, then this should automatically be taken as self defence (and if the person making the threat injures the threat victim while trying not to be killed that will automatically be assault or murder).
So if the ex-husband threatens to kill the ex-wife, she takes the letter to the police, they question him, and if they find that he did indeed make the threat, they give her a free hunting license.
The salespeople saw money. The business people, who would normally assess risk, got blinded by the prospect of making huge amounts of money. The engineers who could see disaster coming were not consulted or ignored.
I suppose the people signing the contracts saw big bonuses coming their way, plus big money from their company share options, with the risk being that they had to find a new job if the deal went sour. So a contract was signed that benefitted those signing the contract, but didn't benefit the company.
IIRC, this was what killed off TRS (they of Dungeons and Dragons). They massively overextended by selling to a large buyer, who then proceeded to return all of the goods right before the deadline expired.
If you have a contract that allows the buyer to return the goods and get the money back, then you haven't actually sold them.
How is it reasonable that the same crime could carry a punishment ranging from 2 to 10 years? I understand variance due to circumstances, but that range seems ripe for abuse.
Pouring motor oil into a lake: Could be 1/4 litre, could be 10,000 litres. There should be a huge range for the "same" crime. Assault: The victim might say "ouch", or the victim might be disfigured and in a wheelchair for the rest of their life. There should be a huge range. Murder: Probably much less variation.
What kind of computer system does Hidalgo county have that 14,000 login attempts would even register as a blip on the CPU?
That doesn't really matter, does it? 14,000 login attempts by one user in one or two days is an unreasonably high number. It was an attempt to create mischief. While it is probably possible to design a system so that 14,000 login attempts cause no problem, Hidalgo county had no obligation to do this.
It's also possible that there were _only_ 14,000 login attempts because the login attempts were done as quickly as the attacked system allowed it, and if Hidalgo's system had been ten times more efficient, there would have been 140,000 login attempts.
I think the issue here is not with security but with privacy. for many people the ip address is PII (personally identifiable information). My hope ip is static and only used by me. so any records showing my ip address are equivalent to showing my home address. If we're going to protect people's PII we should be protecting IP addresses too.
But that was the idea. The intent was to find out who accessed a dropbox account. That information wasn't available directly, but apparently the IP addresses were available. If someone has a legitimate reason to want to find the person, then there is no reason not to hand over IP addresses.
One caveat: The legal fees should be capped, not set to all legal fees. Otherwise, small guy sues big company. Small guy stretches his budget and pays $10,000 in legal fees. Big company's legal budget is $10 million. Big company wins and now small guy is on the hook for $10 million. With this situation, the possibility of losing and needing to pay Big Company's legal fees will become an incentive not to sue big companies.
German rules: Small guy asks for X dollars. Big company offers Y dollars (Y may be zero). Judge notes that they argue about X - Y dollars. Judge takes out a table which says what the court and what each side's lawyers can charge for a case over that amount. (If X - Y is very small or zero, the judge will refuse to hear it).
When the case is finished, judge decides that Big company must pay Z dollars, Z between Y and X. Then cost is apportioned to Small Guy and Big Company. Portion of Big Company is (Z - Y) / (X - Y), portion of small guy is the rest.
If Big Company decides to rack up costs beyond what the judge told them, that's their problem. Since the judge knows how much the court will get paid to hear the case, he will stop them if they make the case too complicated and lengthy. On the other hand, if the little guy asks for gazillions of dollars, the lawyer cost will be and he will most likely eat them. Say you ask for $100 million, the big company offers $10,000 and the judge decides $20,000, then the cost is huge, and you pay almost all of it.
Add compression on top of that. If your data isn't all ZIP, PNG, JPG, MPG, or some other compressed format, the controller turns repetition into even more over-provisioning.
On my Mac, all the big data items are compressed. (Video, audio, audiobooks, pictures). There is a lot of source code, but compared to the disk size that is minimal.
Doesn't this logic mildly upset you. Apple wasn't "green" until someone called them out on being "not green", that someone was a grass roots longstanding activist organization.(mabey with some questionable methods, but thats not relivant to the conversation). Then all of a sudden they are the "greenest company in tech".
Now that is utter bullshit. Greenpeace posted complaints about Apple because Apple didn't donate to the good cause, and because even in 2007 complaining about Apple would produce headlines.
At that time Greenpeace published a list marking computer companies on their greenness based on their promises. Among other things, they rated HP up for promising to get rid of some poisonous components and rated Apple down for not making any such promises - not realising (or worse, fully knowing) that Apple had removed the same poisonous components in the previous year.
That would be relevant if the police had breached some rights of the car owner, for example by illegally installing a GPS device in girlfriend's car. In that case, since the perpetrator's rights were not breached, he would have no right to complain.
Since the car dealership could fully legitimately track the position of the car, they were completely in their rights to give the position of the car anyway. Even more so since they had no obligation against the perpetrator. And even more so since the location data was used to find the victim of a crime, not just the criminal.
That's something that's absolutely fascinating about the discussion: People get all excited about someone's perceived right to privacy, and completely forgetting the rights of the victim to her life and to her freedom.
Actually, if 30 days was the sentence for knowingly destroying the evidence that would have otherwise resulted in a fine, I'd say it's in NO way excessive. Though I guess the problem with it is not the sentence (which seemed totally reasonable) but the statute that was used to convict, which could actually define the rules for all preservation of "evidence" under Sarbanes-Oxley rules...
A British minister of parliament (Chris Huhne) and his wife were each sentenced to eight months jail for perverting the course of justice, when they lied about who had driven a car that got a speeding ticket. Three points on the wrong license (she accepted the fine instead of her husband), eight months jail each.
Evidently gay is highly contagious. Scientists say it's not airborne, but some of them have got it, so there's obviously a lot they don't know about how gay is spread. It stands to reason we should do everything we an think of to reduce the public exposure to gay.
To reduce the risk, we have to tear down all statues of men who ever worked together with a gay man. That's how contagious it is.
Not in the US. Free speech is a constitutionally guaranteed right. Judges don't get to weigh the costs or benefits of speech.
Of course they do. That's why all the school kids in the USA learn "you mustn't yell 'fire' in a theatre". And they also learn that free speech may have consequences at a US school. You can't even call your WiFi network "Islamic Jihadist Terrorist Network". That's just four words, and you can be sure some judge will weigh the costs or benefits of speech if you get caught.
What defines 'evocative'? And what defines a 'personal touch' other than an intentional or unintentional deviation from the score as written? Is there a variant of the Turing test in which we judge if a piece of music is played by a human or a machine?
Here you are, at last. Been waiting for that. Every slashdot article needs a poster who complains "but who defines this and that? Who is to judge? "
Quite obviously it was the critic who decided, and since the newspaper didn't get complaints (and here in this thread there is half a dozen people agreeing and nobody that I saw disagreeing with her), that's it.
Except it doesn't work this way. A review of a performance isn't personal data and isn't protected by any law in the EU hence the summary is completely wrong.
Trying to think about it... A review about a performance either describes the performance correctly, or it doesn't. If it describes the performance correctly, then I would think that it is personal data. And if it doesn't describe it correctly, well, for a newspaper that would be an awful defines. "We can print anything about you and as long as it isn't true, it's not personal data".
Since iOS and Android are not mentioned, I'll assume that iOS counts as "Apple", and Android counts as "Linux". So everyone buying a Samsung phone is now a Linux user.
Guess you don't actually run 8.0 anymore (or you are domain joined) because on my 8.0 system a pop-up asking me to upgrade to 8.1 shows up every 2 hours after an Windows update a couple months ago.
People are probably so pissed off with Windows 8 that this is just another annoyance to them that they ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, as long as only "reasonable technical assistance" is required, there is no danger. Good encryption is designed to be (practically) unbreakable unless the key is known, hence expecting somebody to break it without the key is not "reasonable" at all.
The four digit passcode on an iPhone is "safe enough" because only software signed by Apple can take a passcode and try to use it to unlock a phone, and the Apple-signed software on your iPhone doesn't allow a practical brute force attack. Apple could however create its own software to do a brute force attack if they have your iPhone and crack it, which they used to do if the police handed them a warrant and a phone (doesn't work with random eight digit or mixed digit/letter code because it takes too long). Apparently Apple changed this system so even Apple cannot brute force your iPhone anymore.
The court actually _can_ order you to decrypt a device (not cracking the decryption because most people wouldn't have the slightest clue how to do it) in most cases, except when the fact that you can decrypt it is by itself incriminating you. (So if unlocking an iPhone, showing the judge that it is unlocked, and locking it again without letting anyone access it would incriminate you, then you can't be required to unlock it). The rest of your argument is perfectly fine.
[1] OK, here's my rant. Programmers do not understand the value of good documentation. If you look at really good projects they have great documentation. If I can not find documentation for a software package or it is in poor shape I simply do not use the software. Esp. in this short term sprint oriented era I do not have time to waste fumbling around trying to get something to work. If it isn't function OOTB in less than I day I do not have time for it. End of story.
Programmers _do_ understand the value of good documentation. Well, most of them. They just don't like creating it.
"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."
I'd love to see exactly which law Tower Records would have been violating (the case seems quite old, since Tower Records went bankrupt in 2006). It would have been hugely unpopular and there would been a huge drop in sales, but I very much doubt that it would violate any laws.
Comparing the bill of materials with the retail price and claiming the difference is "markup" just demonstrates that you have not the slightest clue about economics and should never, ever be allowed to run a shop.
I've driven thousands of kilometers on the German Autobahn. The safety issue is not so much the speed relative to the ground, but the speed relative to other drivers. If you're going 170kph in the left lane in your BMW, and grandma in her 1990 Volkswagen swerves left to overtake a truck, you've got pretty limited distance to slow down (at high speed)..
Another interesting part of traffic laws: You must be prepared for people making mistakes. So if you see grandma slowly approaching that truck, you must take into account that she might switch right into your lane and drive accordingly.
Apart from long stretches with explicit speed limit signs, there's also the fact that if you are involved in an accident at over 80mph, it is assumed that it was your fault unless you can prove that the accident would have happened at lower speed as well. And there is the general rule that you mustn't drive faster than road condition.
Since US and German driving were compared, German police is really tough on tailgating. You will see cameras on motorways, they don't measure speed but the distance between cars. The correct distance is speed in km/h, divided by 2, as meters. Less than half that can get you a ticket (25 mtrs and 100 km/h = 62mph). Even less distance gives serious fines and can be a criminal offence.
The trick is, what's a real threat, what's not? What's defamatory, what's not?
The question here isn't really whether it is a "real threat" or not. (Although if it is a real threat then the police needs to go out and arrest the guy, this is not a matter of "freedom of speech", it is a matter of preventing a murder). The question is whether the speech is damaging to the victim. And a death threat is absolutely without any doubt damaging. Seriously, that's why the death threat is being made, to cause damage to the victim.
I'd say a good law change would be to state that when a death threat is made, and the victim of the death threat kills the person threatening them in any way, then this should automatically be taken as self defence (and if the person making the threat injures the threat victim while trying not to be killed that will automatically be assault or murder).
So if the ex-husband threatens to kill the ex-wife, she takes the letter to the police, they question him, and if they find that he did indeed make the threat, they give her a free hunting license.
The salespeople saw money. The business people, who would normally assess risk, got blinded by the prospect of making huge amounts of money. The engineers who could see disaster coming were not consulted or ignored.
I suppose the people signing the contracts saw big bonuses coming their way, plus big money from their company share options, with the risk being that they had to find a new job if the deal went sour. So a contract was signed that benefitted those signing the contract, but didn't benefit the company.
IIRC, this was what killed off TRS (they of Dungeons and Dragons). They massively overextended by selling to a large buyer, who then proceeded to return all of the goods right before the deadline expired.
If you have a contract that allows the buyer to return the goods and get the money back, then you haven't actually sold them.
How is it reasonable that the same crime could carry a punishment ranging from 2 to 10 years? I understand variance due to circumstances, but that range seems ripe for abuse.
Pouring motor oil into a lake: Could be 1/4 litre, could be 10,000 litres. There should be a huge range for the "same" crime. Assault: The victim might say "ouch", or the victim might be disfigured and in a wheelchair for the rest of their life. There should be a huge range. Murder: Probably much less variation.
What kind of computer system does Hidalgo county have that 14,000 login attempts would even register as a blip on the CPU?
That doesn't really matter, does it? 14,000 login attempts by one user in one or two days is an unreasonably high number. It was an attempt to create mischief. While it is probably possible to design a system so that 14,000 login attempts cause no problem, Hidalgo county had no obligation to do this.
It's also possible that there were _only_ 14,000 login attempts because the login attempts were done as quickly as the attacked system allowed it, and if Hidalgo's system had been ten times more efficient, there would have been 140,000 login attempts.
I think the issue here is not with security but with privacy. for many people the ip address is PII (personally identifiable information). My hope ip is static and only used by me. so any records showing my ip address are equivalent to showing my home address. If we're going to protect people's PII we should be protecting IP addresses too.
But that was the idea. The intent was to find out who accessed a dropbox account. That information wasn't available directly, but apparently the IP addresses were available. If someone has a legitimate reason to want to find the person, then there is no reason not to hand over IP addresses.
One caveat: The legal fees should be capped, not set to all legal fees. Otherwise, small guy sues big company. Small guy stretches his budget and pays $10,000 in legal fees. Big company's legal budget is $10 million. Big company wins and now small guy is on the hook for $10 million. With this situation, the possibility of losing and needing to pay Big Company's legal fees will become an incentive not to sue big companies.
German rules: Small guy asks for X dollars. Big company offers Y dollars (Y may be zero). Judge notes that they argue about X - Y dollars. Judge takes out a table which says what the court and what each side's lawyers can charge for a case over that amount. (If X - Y is very small or zero, the judge will refuse to hear it).
When the case is finished, judge decides that Big company must pay Z dollars, Z between Y and X. Then cost is apportioned to Small Guy and Big Company. Portion of Big Company is (Z - Y) / (X - Y), portion of small guy is the rest.
If Big Company decides to rack up costs beyond what the judge told them, that's their problem. Since the judge knows how much the court will get paid to hear the case, he will stop them if they make the case too complicated and lengthy. On the other hand, if the little guy asks for gazillions of dollars, the lawyer cost will be and he will most likely eat them. Say you ask for $100 million, the big company offers $10,000 and the judge decides $20,000, then the cost is huge, and you pay almost all of it.
Add compression on top of that. If your data isn't all ZIP, PNG, JPG, MPG, or some other compressed format, the controller turns repetition into even more over-provisioning.
On my Mac, all the big data items are compressed. (Video, audio, audiobooks, pictures). There is a lot of source code, but compared to the disk size that is minimal.
Doesn't this logic mildly upset you. Apple wasn't "green" until someone called them out on being "not green", that someone was a grass roots longstanding activist organization.(mabey with some questionable methods, but thats not relivant to the conversation). Then all of a sudden they are the "greenest company in tech".
Now that is utter bullshit. Greenpeace posted complaints about Apple because Apple didn't donate to the good cause, and because even in 2007 complaining about Apple would produce headlines.
At that time Greenpeace published a list marking computer companies on their greenness based on their promises. Among other things, they rated HP up for promising to get rid of some poisonous components and rated Apple down for not making any such promises - not realising (or worse, fully knowing) that Apple had removed the same poisonous components in the previous year.
TFA said the car belonged to his girlfriend.
That would be relevant if the police had breached some rights of the car owner, for example by illegally installing a GPS device in girlfriend's car. In that case, since the perpetrator's rights were not breached, he would have no right to complain.
Since the car dealership could fully legitimately track the position of the car, they were completely in their rights to give the position of the car anyway. Even more so since they had no obligation against the perpetrator. And even more so since the location data was used to find the victim of a crime, not just the criminal.
That's something that's absolutely fascinating about the discussion: People get all excited about someone's perceived right to privacy, and completely forgetting the rights of the victim to her life and to her freedom.
Actually, if 30 days was the sentence for knowingly destroying the evidence that would have otherwise resulted in a fine, I'd say it's in NO way excessive. Though I guess the problem with it is not the sentence (which seemed totally reasonable) but the statute that was used to convict, which could actually define the rules for all preservation of "evidence" under Sarbanes-Oxley rules...
A British minister of parliament (Chris Huhne) and his wife were each sentenced to eight months jail for perverting the course of justice, when they lied about who had driven a car that got a speeding ticket. Three points on the wrong license (she accepted the fine instead of her husband), eight months jail each.
Evidently gay is highly contagious. Scientists say it's not airborne, but some of them have got it, so there's obviously a lot they don't know about how gay is spread. It stands to reason we should do everything we an think of to reduce the public exposure to gay.
To reduce the risk, we have to tear down all statues of men who ever worked together with a gay man. That's how contagious it is.
Bloody idiots.
Not in the US. Free speech is a constitutionally guaranteed right. Judges don't get to weigh the costs or benefits of speech.
Of course they do. That's why all the school kids in the USA learn "you mustn't yell 'fire' in a theatre". And they also learn that free speech may have consequences at a US school. You can't even call your WiFi network "Islamic Jihadist Terrorist Network". That's just four words, and you can be sure some judge will weigh the costs or benefits of speech if you get caught.
What defines 'evocative'? And what defines a 'personal touch' other than an intentional or unintentional deviation from the score as written? Is there a variant of the Turing test in which we judge if a piece of music is played by a human or a machine?
Here you are, at last. Been waiting for that. Every slashdot article needs a poster who complains "but who defines this and that? Who is to judge? "
Quite obviously it was the critic who decided, and since the newspaper didn't get complaints (and here in this thread there is half a dozen people agreeing and nobody that I saw disagreeing with her), that's it.
Except it doesn't work this way. A review of a performance isn't personal data and isn't protected by any law in the EU hence the summary is completely wrong.
Trying to think about it... A review about a performance either describes the performance correctly, or it doesn't. If it describes the performance correctly, then I would think that it is personal data. And if it doesn't describe it correctly, well, for a newspaper that would be an awful defines. "We can print anything about you and as long as it isn't true, it's not personal data".
Since iOS and Android are not mentioned, I'll assume that iOS counts as "Apple", and Android counts as "Linux". So everyone buying a Samsung phone is now a Linux user.
Guess you don't actually run 8.0 anymore (or you are domain joined) because on my 8.0 system a pop-up asking me to upgrade to 8.1 shows up every 2 hours after an Windows update a couple months ago.
People are probably so pissed off with Windows 8 that this is just another annoyance to them that they ignore.