Do you really think 10-12 year olds and younger have the know-how to find and download a live distro, flash/burn it, then configure TOR, and access porn!?
Um. Yes. Live CD discs are given away in magazines. Junior high schools computer clubs will give them away.
Even if it were so, a properly locked down system would ask for a password before allowing boot from DVD or USB, and even writing DVD/USB can be turned off for child accounts.
You think the average "my-Dad-is-not-an-IT-person" parent knows how to do that, or would even THINK to do that in the first place?
As for mobile, a solid netnanny type software on mobile should be even more difficult to circumvent as booting of alternate media and bypassing the OS wouldn't be possible with it.
Or they could just do a factory reset. Reboot, and they have a like-new device with no more nanny.
Besides, at some point you have to turn the nanny-software off. And my problem isn't that kids will get access to porn at that point, but that there is no middle ground... its either completely-locked-down, or they're dropped right into hardcore fetish porn. Sure there's playboy grade porn online, but you actually have to go out of your way to find it...its much easier to find hardcore.
At the very least such a filter should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Agreed. That or that you have to make a choice when you sign up for internet service. On or off...but no default. Existing customers? Phone them all, let them know it now exists as a no-charge option, and then ask them if they want it on or off.
Well I'm not saying children should be exposed to everything with no regard to age.
Ok, we agree on that.
If I were a parent I'd start by installing software that blocks access to specified URLs.
Even google images or other search engines with safesearch turned off can be pretty extreme.
If properly done, then it ought to be impossible to circumvent without considerable technical knowledge.
It can't be done, especially not for the average my-Dad-isn't-an-enterprise-grade-IT-admin parent.
I mean really, are you planning on sticking glue in the CDROM drive and USB ports to prevent them from booting a ubuntu live distro with TOR? Because that's all it takes. That netnanny software on the PC? bypassed completely. The URL filtering in your dinky little consumer router? bypassed completely. And no trace left behind, when audit the logs and check the computer... nothing. Your passwords are intact, the software is still running, everything looks just right.
em>In my experience obsession with online porn happens only when real life relationships fail, and real life in general fails to enthuse.
I don't think we're talking about "obsession with online porn". We're talking completely normal healthy 10 - 12 year olds who are curious about sex.
That's what parenting is for, and nothing can replace good parenting.
Ah, another parenting magical wand post. Ok. So, how does parenting solve the problem here?
Blocking all porn from teens won't really matter in the long run.
The stated goal wasn't to block all porn from teens. The goal was to enable teens and pre-teens to find 'beginner porn' and work their way up from there, instead of being sent straight to the advanced fetish classes.
They'll access it through proxies, and once you block proxies and have an impenetrable wall... well simply they'll start 'doing' it with their peers in the real world, and how're you gonna stop that?
I'm pretty skeptical they're going have an anal gangbang their first time out.
The biological drive cannot be stopped, only directed in the right direction and tools given to the children (in the form of value based education)
I'm curious how you think "value based education" enables a curious pre-teen to find beginner porn without having piles of hardcore fetish stuff tossed in their face.
Blinkering their eyes to the reality of the world and protecting them behind the govt's apron isn't gonna really work.
Again, I'm not advocating that.
We can't really protect someone from seeing, hearing or thinking about something...
I'm not suggesting we try to do that. If the kid wants to see a an anal gang bang he'll find it, and I'm fine with that. But what if he's 9 and just starting to be curious about sex and porn... why does he have to see an anal gangbang first?
I'm not suggesting a government censorship solution is the solution, or even a solution. Because its not. But I'm not sure how "parenting" is going to solve the problem that porn on the internet is not well organized, and can not be explored gradually.
What on earth does this condescending bullshit have to do with anything? Who says I'm not parenting? And how do you suggest guiding a pre-teen to "beginner porn" on the internet, without throwing them into gangbang anal humiliation city?
I'm pretty sure this would work out much better for everyone instead of having a secret list of web sites you can't access without gov't permission
I'm pretty sure I was pretty clear that I don't support a secret censorship list. So what exactly is your +5 insightful point here? Because you just agreed with me that censorship isn't the solution and then waved your magical "parenting" wand without actually suggesting how "parenting" will accomplish anything. Your just pandering to the slashdot echo chamber without contributing anything useful.
I wonder what the percentage of blocked sites is that don't actually have most people would consider "porn" on them is up to on this secret list? 10%? 20%?
Given we both agree there shouldn't be a secret list, what difference does it make? I'm much more curious how you suggest parents allow their pre-teens to explore porn on the web simultaneously while keeping them in the shallow end of the pool? What is your magical "parenting" solution?
however, when we old-timers made due juuust fine with our dads' stash of Playboys, and turned out well enough.
For what its worth, that stash of playboy's is not the same as the porn online.
Going online is like finding your dad's stash of hardcore gangbang masochistic anal humiliation fetish porn. Except my dad didn't have a stash of that. So although I was exposed to porn as a kid, it wasn't anything like that. And frankly, I'm not sure kids starting to look at porn should be dropped headfirst into the deep-end of the porn-pool.
It would be nice if one could somehow start with "playboy",and then move up from there in the modern world. The main pages of modern internet porn hubs are crammed full of stuff that doesn't look like fun, doesn't look pleasurable, and that most people don't find the least bit erotic or sexy. A lot of it is pretty grotesque.
Its like learning about food and the pleasures of eating by watching eating contests, food related clips from fear factor and jackass, followed by someone getting their stomach pumped, then someone popping mentos and rootbeer, then 2 girls 1 cup.
I don't object to the stuff that's online existing, or that its legal, or that some people choose to produce and consume it, or that some people get off on it.
But when an 8 or 12 or however old kid starts to be curious about sex and porn... I'd prefer they not have to be subjected straight to that on the first day out.
I actually think the time has come for the idea of true democracy - where everyone gets to vote in parliament on every thing
If the majority of people won't spend 15 minutes sorting out who they want to represent them once every few years, what on earth would be the advantage of giving them a direct vote on every issue?
They'd be voting based on TV soundbites they weren't able to avoid while skipping around the DVR, and the name of the Bill.
And you can still lose with the government promise. I fail to see why you don't understand this.
I completely understand this.
But if the government collapses your old age security pensions are the least of your concerns.
Do you recognize what a 5 decade stock market decline would symbolize?
I'm not postulating year over year losses for 5 decades, I'm postulating a net decline. As in your net worth today, invested however you wish to allocate it, still worth less 5 decades laters.
The Stock market peak in 1929 was not matched again until almost 1960. 20 years after the 1929 stock market crash people still hadn't recovered to where they were before the crash. But for most of that 25 years the stock market was trending upwards.
You people that support "government as the solution to all woes" routinely fail to acknowledge that government can fuck up just as much as the free market, often more so. They aren't infallible,...
"They" ? They are us. A particular administration maybe isn't "us", but "government" in the abstract sure will. But "the government as a whole" represents us, and a social security plan represents societies desire to provide ITSELF that safety net. Yes the people managing it can fuck up, or fuck off... but that's really beside the point.
If we collapse "the government" and start a civil war, that's just society taking dramatic steps to redefine the terms of over how it wants to be governed.
If society collectively has the will and desire to care for the elderly then "the government" will do it, even if it has to start a civil war to make it happen. That is part of government in the larger abstract rather than the specific administration and bureaucracy in place at any given time.
There are assertions (made by the oh-so-trustworthy government) that the files compromise national security and could put lives at risk. But that has low specificity, and given the source very low credibility.
It wasn't up to him to make that decision on behalf of our country. Our intelligence has been damaged, and it has put people in harm's way. As you say, we aren't at war and these are not desperate times, so I do not believe he was justified in his desperate measures
Except that I believe you are on the completely wrong the wrong side of the argument, because its our own NSA that was not engaged in "desperate measures". It was violating our own citizens privacy, doing an end run around the law, undermining checks and balances with secret courts that rubberstamped everything, secret warrants, gag orders, while spying on our closest allies, and then lying about all of it to our elected representatives. And for what?! What grave existential threat to the USA are we up against that necessitated all this?
There simply isn't one. Snowden was right to reveal it, because they shouldn't have been doing it or anything like it. We aren't at war, we aren't even really threatened, and they did not need that level of disregard for morality or the law to preserve our way of life.
Or it could be an MITM proxy page for the NSA, and they just forgot to sign it. The trouble with self signed certs is you don't know who you are talking to at all.
Self signed certs have always been safer when used properly.
In a closed controlled enterprise environment self-signed certs are fine, and reasonably easy to do well.
Using them properly on the public internet however is pretty much impossible. Keys with a chain of trust to a 3rd party certificate authority (e.g. verisign, comodo, et al) are exactly that... chains of trust. Can I trust that verisign hasn't be compromised by your average hacker? Probably, for the most part yes. Can I trust that verisign hasn't rolled over and opened its legs for the NSA? No. I can't.
But having the average https site switch over to self-signed certs to avoid using NSA-compromised-verisign isn't a solution as I have no convenient way to verify when i enter their web address that I haven't been presented with a MITM site (hosted by a hacker... or even by the NSA which is the whole reason we dumped Verisign certs for self-signed in the first place...)
Right or wrong, "War Crime" is always defined by the winning side.
Getting away with it doesn't excuse doing it.
Further, there has been no serious existential threat to the west since World War II.
The wars we've engaged in since then are for "fun and profits". We are not defending our very existence and way of life, so any rationale for committing desperate acts of extreme horror falls completely flat on its face. Even when al quaeda was at its peak, and 9-11 was fresh... it was but a broken fingernail in terms of a real existential threat. We've so thoroughly forgotten the ravages of war that we have no perspective on appropriate levels of action or reaction at all.
We aren't at war. War is hell. WW2 was an existential threat to our way of life. Syria is having a small war. But the US? One fairly bad day 10 years ago.
There is no excuse for any actions that violate international law, treaties, and conventions, these are not desperate times.
If we find ourselves in a real war, where the stakes are freedom and our way of life, and the casualty count is ticking up into the millions then I'll be with you in the camp that says: the ends justify the means, and we must win at at all costs, because losing is not an option.
So, yeah, I'll stand behind any soldier that acts in accordance with his conscience in today's conflicts. We can well afford the luxury of prosecuting our so-called "wars" with a very light touch right now.
Then you limit the investment options -- this isn't all that hard
I don't think you are getting it. Its not just stocks. Its anything. index ETFs, mutuals, government bonds, anything.
When you invest, you are lending your money to another party or parties. You are taking a risk that you won't get the money back, and/or that you won't get the returns promised. The amount of return is commensurate with the risk. This is all elementary and I'm sure you already know that.
But what you don't seem to grok, is that there is no such thing a sure thing. When you invest you take a risk. It could be a very low risk, but a low risk is still a risk.
Their is no rule that a stock market will always go up or that it will even at least keep up with inflation. A 100 years of ups and downs but mostly ups, with an overall dramatic net "up" doesn't mean the next 50 years will to. As they disclaim on everything, past performance does not gaurantee future results.
Quite simply, for the next 50 years the market could go down on average. Index funds, mutuals, everything could slide and not rebound until after your dead. The economy could shrink. The nation could go into decline.
some companies just enroll you in lifecycle funds that do all the risk-reward allocations for you based on your age profile.
And if the entire stock market just goes horizontal or even experiences a net decline over the next 5 decades?
This isn't rocket science.
No, its not hard at all to follow an investment strategy with the "right" balance of risk reward for your age profile. But what you seem to be failing to get is that doing that doesn't guarantee you anything. You are merely choosing how much risk you are willing to accept. But you are still accepting risk, and you can still LOSE.
So your 80 and need safe investments... you pick AAA rated bonds. The bond rating agency wrong, or something exceptional happened, or maybe the ratings agency was outright corrupt, the issuers fold, you get pennies on the dollar.
Its not supposed to happen, but it does. Oh, but just one junk bond being mis-rated won't affect you if you are properly diversified.
Correct. But what if the entire market is mis-rated? Hello sub-prime-mortgage crises. Hello people invested in AAA investments losing money hand over fist. Hello people invested in banks, and bedrock bluechip financial firms losing money hand over first. Mutual funds in decline. Index ETFs in decline.
Shit happens. Doing things right doesn't gaurantee you anything. It merely gives you the best chance of doing ok, not a gaurantee.
There is a chain of command, and ethics usually come in second to winning the war because being dead and ethical isn't as good as being alive and unethical in the context of a war.
"Just following orders" is long established as not a good enough reason to be complicit in war crimes.
The other problem is the fog of war, if everything is compartmentalized then how can you know what is or isn't ethical in a situation when the information you have is incomplete and "need to know".
If you are being asked to commit something that could be considered a war crime, then you probably "need to know"... either that it just is a war crime and you probably shouldn't do it.
while CI looks at whether or not you'd be the type of guy (like Snowden) who'd sell US secrets to someone that wasn't an American.
Pretty sure Snowden could have honestly replied to any questions that made him sound like a spy.
Or is a standard question... "If you found out your the entire apparatus of your employer up to the very top was corrupt and conducting illegal acts, and then lying to Congress about it. Would you keep quiet and participate in those criminal acts in violation of the law and the constitution?
Lol... reminds me of those ethics tests they make people take for retail jobs. Where the "right" answers are to be a sociopath freak.
"Suppose there is a coworker you were friends with, lived through a kidnapping with, and who is the god parent to your children and the best man at your wedding, and is in your opinion an excellent employee. Now if they were in a car accident, and he's running a touch late. He calls you from the parking lot as he's rushing in and asks you to punch them in so they would not appear to be late... would you: a) clock him in early b) stay out of it c) promptly report that he asked you to clock him in on time to your manager, and testify for the company against him when we sue him for the attempt to commit fraud?
Company Answer sheet: a = wrong answer, automatic fail, and you are a worthless criminal b = wrong answer c = correct, this is the exactly the kind of people we want as employees. Just think, your new boss passed this test!! We bet you are looking to work with such ethical people!
Right. That's always been a problem with TVs... they jam the better displays with junk i don't need. Me, I just want a big ass screen that's really good at being a big ass screen. It doesn't need speakers - i have the TV muted. It certainly doesn't need apps - its not even on the network. Hell, it doesn't need 3 composite inputs and 4 hdmi ports and coax, and 2 RCA input groups...
I have it connected to a receiver, and all my stuff goes into that. One HDMI cable connects to the TV.
But they don't make that TV. So I buy one with a bunch of extra crap, speakers, and apps, and then never use any of it.
One solution to quite a few of these problems is a USB dongle that holds the keys and handles the actual encryption.
aka... TPM / Trusted Computing. you don't even need the usb device.
That would indeed go a long way towards solving the problem, provided we get to control the keys. Alas TPM / TC is subverted by the content creation industry... so they "own" the platform instead of us for the most part. But in terms of the tech itself, its a solution that already exists if we just had the willpower to take control of it.
But even a usb based encryption solution doesn't render using a web app / web service safe, because the javascript can just slurp the decrypted content coming out of the device and pass it up to whoever. Using a web app REQUIRES trust of the service provider, because they control the client.
You can use a service provider without trusting them, provided you can supply your own client. Its not enough to provide your own usb/hardware encryption... you have to control the client itself. The decrypted content must not enter the control of something the service provider controls.
It does not get you the whole way there. But I sure makes it harder for the NSA.
For a service outside the jurisdiction of the NSA or other opressive govt agency yes, I agree, but its not just the NSA.
At the end of the day, client side keys manipulated by javascript via local storage require trusting the service provider not to slurp them from me. I want a solution that doesn't require that trust.
So on a technological level you can simply increase the time the javscript files are cached and have some external monitoring for changes.
Again, the service provider controls this. I have to trust the service provider.
But there is still a way between not trusting anyone and auditing everything yourself and sending unencrypted mails that everybody can read.
Agreed. And the way to that is to separate the client doing the encryption/decryption and message presentation and editing from service provider doing the transport and remote storage.
Just as I don't need to trust my ISP to make a certificates based HTTPS SSL/TLS connections to a remote server with offline key exchange done in advance. The ISP don't hold the private keys. They can't MITM me. They can't slurp data from out of the browser via javascript unless they can get me to download a maliciously altered browser. The NSA can tap my ISP all they want, but unless they compromise me or the remote server or have cracked the encryption itself they can store all the gibberish they like. That is the reasonable compromise.
HTML5 local storage of private keys accessed by a web app is not. That's the equivalent of not trusting the cleaning service to have a copy of your front door keys... so you have them use a key you leave under the welcome mat instead, and tell them not to take it or make copies. If you don't trust the cleaning service... this is not a step "forward".
On a political level: I live in Germany. The NSA cannot tell me anything. And Germany had two of the worst terror regimes in the last century. I don't think people here would tolerate being treated like you are now.
I'm not an American either, nor am I in America. As far as the NSA is concerned, that makes my communications completely fair game... even if the USA gets its act together in terms of warrants and secret courts that's just "domestic surveillance of American citizens" you and I are the "legitimate targets of the NSA" in the sense that the NSA doesn't even have the perfunctory hassle of even hypothetically needing a pretense to monitor everything we say.
There is e-mail monitoring in Germany, but it's based on laws and courts that are not secret.
Unless its not. Because if its being done in secret, then by definition you don't know.
Getting paranoid does not help anybody. It just prevents you from acting, because there is no completely safe way to communicate.
Except there is. We already have the technology. HTTPS with SSL/TLS using self-signed certificates exchanged via offline channels.
And it works because of the division of responsibility. Our ISP is not our client (browser in that case) provider. If we were all AOL subscribers, using AOL browser, then we'd be boned.
1.) This is not true. You can design a mail system to store the private key on the client (html5 local storage).
Until I have some sort of assurance that the key stored in local storage, can't be sent up to the server by javascript then this gets me no where.
The NSA asks your mail service for the keys. The mail service says we don't have them... html5 local storage. NSA says... add this line of javascript to your site. Next time I log in they have my key, and everyone else who accessed the site during that interval.
And even if we build a whole new spec with a wall of protection around the key, so the javascript just sends the encrypted text in and gets the decrypted key out and never gets its hand on the keys only then will the key be safe.
But any messages I access still are not. Because as long as I'm relying on javascript downloaded from the service to display the messages, I am vulnerable to that javascript being updated and sending that message back up to the server.
The client cannot be provided on demand by the server to have a hope in hell of being safe. Really it needs to be 3rd party, open source, audited by more 3rd parties, and the binaries I install.. well I don't... I download the source and compile it myself after checking that the hashes match the original and the 3rd party auditors. And even then, I have to trust that the NSA didn't get to everyone and conspire to publish malicious source. So to be truly safe, I have to audit it myself.
Real security from the likes of the NSA is HARD.
3.) Not true. See 1. If you authenticate using a private key you only need the password to decrypt the key and no username anymore.
True but you underestimate how little tolerance the average person has for passwords. An awful large number of people don't have login passwords to their computers and fewer still on their phones. And their mail passwords are remembered by the software so they don't have to enter them.
I've always wondered why this isn't better integrated/more automatic when it comes to email systems (gmail?)
3 reasons
1) Technical - gmail needs to have your private key to decrypt messages sent to you with your public key. Or to sign messages sent by you with your private key. They absolutely cannot offer a webmail service, if they can't descrypt your mail to show it to you over the web. If gmail has your private key, its not a very private key. The NSA can just quietly ask google for the key.
2) Business - gmail wants to mine your data. They can't do that if they can't read it. The business model of gmail is incompatible with providing a service where they can't read your data.
3) Conveniencel - having to enter pass phrases all the time is a chore. Nobody wants to do it.
Color my cynical but I see all this hype with 3D TV and movies and cable companies looking at these silly things as a way to extort money from $50 a month to $199 for HD. WIth 4K HD here comes $499 a month, now add conference rooms and TV makers,... oh I guess greenRay DVDs are needed so now Sony can make even MORE $$$ for these etc. Sadly idiots wil pay for these too and then wonder how they are just barely making it with their middle class salaries and how they could have bought a brand new car for the monthly bills they keep paying for such garbage with minor improvements of what they had.
Just because they make it, doesn't mean wel'll buy it.
3DTV is probably here to stay, but not a lot of people are upgrading TVs just to get 3D. And 3D media is fairly scarce and largely irrelevant. Even the TV salesmen will admit that 3D is a flop. Nobody with a 60" edge lit LCD from 3 years ago is even slightly interested in upgrading to 3D. The only people buying them are people upgrading from CRT, upgrading from a smaller TV, or who have a older LCDs/Plasmas/DLPs that are dying. And they are buying them because it doesn't cost any more than a TV without 3D.
4K HD... I'm looking forward to that one with respect to computer displays etc, but I doubt a lot of people care for TV. I doubt it'll gain traction as a must have upgrade, and will instead become like 3DTV... where everyone buying a new TV will end up with it once its no more expensive than buying a TV without it. And half or more of them will never be used with any 4K content anyway for years to come.
oh I guess greenRay DVDs are needed
Blu ray launched just in time for the disc market to collapse as people switched to streaming. I doubt a greenRay tech will ever see the light of day as consumer disc media for movies. Most people are satisfied with streaming stuff at lower quality than DVD, nevermind bluray... the content market for 4HD just doesn't exist no matter how badly the gear industry wants one. Meanwhile the broadcasters don't have the bandwidth for it. The movie rental places have nearly disappeared. The movie stores are struggling and diversifying away from movies.
We'll get 4HD gear sooner than later, and 4HD content eventually, I'm sure, but its going to take some amazing marketing to convince us we need it enough to upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
Open source is just that, you can read the source of the programs
I believe the suspicion is the RDRAND cpu instruction itself is a black box from intel that may have been subverted by the NSA.
As such, no, it can't be audited, and it's source cannot be inspected.
My car, on the other hand, had great styling and the early prototypes were wowing the press with its performance and features.
Is there a reason you've got 2 posts on it now without actually naming the vehicle/model/year? :)
Do you really think 10-12 year olds and younger have the know-how to find and download a live distro, flash/burn it, then configure TOR, and access porn!?
Um. Yes. Live CD discs are given away in magazines. Junior high schools computer clubs will give them away.
Even if it were so, a properly locked down system would ask for a password before allowing boot from DVD or USB, and even writing DVD/USB can be turned off for child accounts.
You think the average "my-Dad-is-not-an-IT-person" parent knows how to do that, or would even THINK to do that in the first place?
As for mobile, a solid netnanny type software on mobile should be even more difficult to circumvent as booting of alternate media and bypassing the OS wouldn't be possible with it.
Or they could just do a factory reset. Reboot, and they have a like-new device with no more nanny.
Besides, at some point you have to turn the nanny-software off. And my problem isn't that kids will get access to porn at that point, but that there is no middle ground... its either completely-locked-down, or they're dropped right into hardcore fetish porn. Sure there's playboy grade porn online, but you actually have to go out of your way to find it...its much easier to find hardcore.
At the very least such a filter should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Agreed. That or that you have to make a choice when you sign up for internet service. On or off...but no default. Existing customers? Phone them all, let them know it now exists as a no-charge option, and then ask them if they want it on or off.
Well I'm not saying children should be exposed to everything with no regard to age.
Ok, we agree on that.
If I were a parent I'd start by installing software that blocks access to specified URLs.
Even google images or other search engines with safesearch turned off can be pretty extreme.
If properly done, then it ought to be impossible to circumvent without considerable technical knowledge.
It can't be done, especially not for the average my-Dad-isn't-an-enterprise-grade-IT-admin parent.
I mean really, are you planning on sticking glue in the CDROM drive and USB ports to prevent them from booting a ubuntu live distro with TOR? Because that's all it takes. That netnanny software on the PC? bypassed completely. The URL filtering in your dinky little consumer router? bypassed completely. And no trace left behind, when audit the logs and check the computer... nothing. Your passwords are intact, the software is still running, everything looks just right.
em>In my experience obsession with online porn happens only when real life relationships fail, and real life in general fails to enthuse.
I don't think we're talking about "obsession with online porn". We're talking completely normal healthy 10 - 12 year olds who are curious about sex.
That's what parenting is for, and nothing can replace good parenting.
Ah, another parenting magical wand post. Ok. So, how does parenting solve the problem here?
Blocking all porn from teens won't really matter in the long run.
The stated goal wasn't to block all porn from teens. The goal was to enable teens and pre-teens to find 'beginner porn' and work their way up from there, instead of being sent straight to the advanced fetish classes.
They'll access it through proxies, and once you block proxies and have an impenetrable wall... well simply they'll start 'doing' it with their peers in the real world, and how're you gonna stop that?
I'm pretty skeptical they're going have an anal gangbang their first time out.
The biological drive cannot be stopped, only directed in the right direction and tools given to the children (in the form of value based education)
I'm curious how you think "value based education" enables a curious pre-teen to find beginner porn without having piles of hardcore fetish stuff tossed in their face.
Blinkering their eyes to the reality of the world and protecting them behind the govt's apron isn't gonna really work.
Again, I'm not advocating that.
We can't really protect someone from seeing, hearing or thinking about something...
I'm not suggesting we try to do that. If the kid wants to see a an anal gang bang he'll find it, and I'm fine with that. But what if he's 9 and just starting to be curious about sex and porn... why does he have to see an anal gangbang first?
I'm not suggesting a government censorship solution is the solution, or even a solution. Because its not. But I'm not sure how "parenting" is going to solve the problem that porn on the internet is not well organized, and can not be explored gradually.
And I suggest this be named "parenting".
What on earth does this condescending bullshit have to do with anything? Who says I'm not parenting? And how do you suggest guiding a pre-teen to "beginner porn" on the internet, without throwing them into gangbang anal humiliation city?
I'm pretty sure this would work out much better for everyone instead of having a secret list of web sites you can't access without gov't permission
I'm pretty sure I was pretty clear that I don't support a secret censorship list. So what exactly is your +5 insightful point here? Because you just agreed with me that censorship isn't the solution and then waved your magical "parenting" wand without actually suggesting how "parenting" will accomplish anything. Your just pandering to the slashdot echo chamber without contributing anything useful.
I wonder what the percentage of blocked sites is that don't actually have most people would consider "porn" on them is up to on this secret list? 10%? 20%?
Given we both agree there shouldn't be a secret list, what difference does it make? I'm much more curious how you suggest parents allow their pre-teens to explore porn on the web simultaneously while keeping them in the shallow end of the pool? What is your magical "parenting" solution?
however, when we old-timers made due juuust fine with our dads' stash of Playboys, and turned out well enough.
For what its worth, that stash of playboy's is not the same as the porn online.
Going online is like finding your dad's stash of hardcore gangbang masochistic anal humiliation fetish porn. Except my dad didn't have a stash of that. So although I was exposed to porn as a kid, it wasn't anything like that. And frankly, I'm not sure kids starting to look at porn should be dropped headfirst into the deep-end of the porn-pool.
It would be nice if one could somehow start with "playboy",and then move up from there in the modern world. The main pages of modern internet porn hubs are crammed full of stuff that doesn't look like fun, doesn't look pleasurable, and that most people don't find the least bit erotic or sexy. A lot of it is pretty grotesque.
Its like learning about food and the pleasures of eating by watching eating contests, food related clips from fear factor and jackass, followed by someone getting their stomach pumped, then someone popping mentos and rootbeer, then 2 girls 1 cup.
I don't object to the stuff that's online existing, or that its legal, or that some people choose to produce and consume it, or that some people get off on it.
But when an 8 or 12 or however old kid starts to be curious about sex and porn... I'd prefer they not have to be subjected straight to that on the first day out.
I actually think the time has come for the idea of true democracy - where everyone gets to vote in parliament on every thing
If the majority of people won't spend 15 minutes sorting out who they want to represent them once every few years, what on earth would be the advantage of giving them a direct vote on every issue?
They'd be voting based on TV soundbites they weren't able to avoid while skipping around the DVR, and the name of the Bill.
Open Source is really tricky to do well and make money from and sometimes it is just not a viable business model.
Agreed. But security is a paramount concern for society, so perhaps a little NSA and TSA funding can be redirected to funding OSS security products.
That's how I'd approach it if you made me benevolent dictator for life at least. :)
And you can still lose with the government promise. I fail to see why you don't understand this.
I completely understand this.
But if the government collapses your old age security pensions are the least of your concerns.
Do you recognize what a 5 decade stock market decline would symbolize?
I'm not postulating year over year losses for 5 decades, I'm postulating a net decline. As in your net worth today, invested however you wish to allocate it, still worth less 5 decades laters.
The Stock market peak in 1929 was not matched again until almost 1960. 20 years after the 1929 stock market crash people still hadn't recovered to where they were before the crash. But for most of that 25 years the stock market was trending upwards.
You people that support "government as the solution to all woes" routinely fail to acknowledge that government can fuck up just as much as the free market, often more so. They aren't infallible,...
"They" ? They are us. A particular administration maybe isn't "us", but "government" in the abstract sure will. But "the government as a whole" represents us, and a social security plan represents societies desire to provide ITSELF that safety net. Yes the people managing it can fuck up, or fuck off... but that's really beside the point.
If we collapse "the government" and start a civil war, that's just society taking dramatic steps to redefine the terms of over how it wants to be governed.
If society collectively has the will and desire to care for the elderly then "the government" will do it, even if it has to start a civil war to make it happen. That is part of government in the larger abstract rather than the specific administration and bureaucracy in place at any given time.
Such as? I haven't seen anything of the sort.
There are assertions (made by the oh-so-trustworthy government) that the files compromise national security and could put lives at risk. But that has low specificity, and given the source very low credibility.
because its our own NSA that was not engaged in "desperate measures".
I meant to say our own NSA **WAS** engaged in "desperate measures".
It wasn't up to him to make that decision on behalf of our country. Our intelligence has been damaged, and it has put people in harm's way. As you say, we aren't at war and these are not desperate times, so I do not believe he was justified in his desperate measures
Except that I believe you are on the completely wrong the wrong side of the argument, because its our own NSA that was not engaged in "desperate measures". It was violating our own citizens privacy, doing an end run around the law, undermining checks and balances with secret courts that rubberstamped everything, secret warrants, gag orders, while spying on our closest allies, and then lying about all of it to our elected representatives. And for what?! What grave existential threat to the USA are we up against that necessitated all this?
There simply isn't one. Snowden was right to reveal it, because they shouldn't have been doing it or anything like it. We aren't at war, we aren't even really threatened, and they did not need that level of disregard for morality or the law to preserve our way of life.
Or it could be an MITM proxy page for the NSA, and they just forgot to sign it. The trouble with self signed certs is you don't know who you are talking to at all.
This case self signed certs would be safer.
Self signed certs have always been safer when used properly.
In a closed controlled enterprise environment self-signed certs are fine, and reasonably easy to do well.
Using them properly on the public internet however is pretty much impossible. Keys with a chain of trust to a 3rd party certificate authority (e.g. verisign, comodo, et al) are exactly that ... chains of trust. Can I trust that verisign hasn't be compromised by your average hacker? Probably, for the most part yes. Can I trust that verisign hasn't rolled over and opened its legs for the NSA? No. I can't.
But having the average https site switch over to self-signed certs to avoid using NSA-compromised-verisign isn't a solution as I have no convenient way to verify when i enter their web address that I haven't been presented with a MITM site (hosted by a hacker... or even by the NSA which is the whole reason we dumped Verisign certs for self-signed in the first place...)
Right or wrong, "War Crime" is always defined by the winning side.
Getting away with it doesn't excuse doing it.
Further, there has been no serious existential threat to the west since World War II.
The wars we've engaged in since then are for "fun and profits". We are not defending our very existence and way of life, so any rationale for committing desperate acts of extreme horror falls completely flat on its face. Even when al quaeda was at its peak, and 9-11 was fresh... it was but a broken fingernail in terms of a real existential threat. We've so thoroughly forgotten the ravages of war that we have no perspective on appropriate levels of action or reaction at all.
We aren't at war. War is hell. WW2 was an existential threat to our way of life. Syria is having a small war. But the US? One fairly bad day 10 years ago.
There is no excuse for any actions that violate international law, treaties, and conventions, these are not desperate times.
If we find ourselves in a real war, where the stakes are freedom and our way of life, and the casualty count is ticking up into the millions then I'll be with you in the camp that says: the ends justify the means, and we must win at at all costs, because losing is not an option.
So, yeah, I'll stand behind any soldier that acts in accordance with his conscience in today's conflicts. We can well afford the luxury of prosecuting our so-called "wars" with a very light touch right now.
Then you limit the investment options -- this isn't all that hard
I don't think you are getting it. Its not just stocks. Its anything. index ETFs, mutuals, government bonds, anything.
When you invest, you are lending your money to another party or parties. You are taking a risk that you won't get the money back, and/or that you won't get the returns promised. The amount of return is commensurate with the risk. This is all elementary and I'm sure you already know that.
But what you don't seem to grok, is that there is no such thing a sure thing. When you invest you take a risk. It could be a very low risk, but a low risk is still a risk.
Their is no rule that a stock market will always go up or that it will even at least keep up with inflation. A 100 years of ups and downs but mostly ups, with an overall dramatic net "up" doesn't mean the next 50 years will to. As they disclaim on everything, past performance does not gaurantee future results.
Quite simply, for the next 50 years the market could go down on average. Index funds, mutuals, everything could slide and not rebound until after your dead. The economy could shrink. The nation could go into decline.
some companies just enroll you in lifecycle funds that do all the risk-reward allocations for you based on your age profile.
And if the entire stock market just goes horizontal or even experiences a net decline over the next 5 decades?
This isn't rocket science.
No, its not hard at all to follow an investment strategy with the "right" balance of risk reward for your age profile. But what you seem to be failing to get is that doing that doesn't guarantee you anything. You are merely choosing how much risk you are willing to accept. But you are still accepting risk, and you can still LOSE.
So your 80 and need safe investments... you pick AAA rated bonds. The bond rating agency wrong, or something exceptional happened, or maybe the ratings agency was outright corrupt, the issuers fold, you get pennies on the dollar.
Its not supposed to happen, but it does. Oh, but just one junk bond being mis-rated won't affect you if you are properly diversified.
Correct. But what if the entire market is mis-rated? Hello sub-prime-mortgage crises. Hello people invested in AAA investments losing money hand over fist. Hello people invested in banks, and bedrock bluechip financial firms losing money hand over first. Mutual funds in decline. Index ETFs in decline.
Shit happens. Doing things right doesn't gaurantee you anything. It merely gives you the best chance of doing ok, not a gaurantee.
There is a chain of command, and ethics usually come in second to winning the war because being dead and ethical isn't as good as being alive and unethical in the context of a war.
"Just following orders" is long established as not a good enough reason to be complicit in war crimes.
The other problem is the fog of war, if everything is compartmentalized then how can you know what is or isn't ethical in a situation when the information you have is incomplete and "need to know".
If you are being asked to commit something that could be considered a war crime, then you probably "need to know" ... either that it just is a war crime and you probably shouldn't do it.
while CI looks at whether or not you'd be the type of guy (like Snowden) who'd sell US secrets to someone that wasn't an American.
Pretty sure Snowden could have honestly replied to any questions that made him sound like a spy.
Or is a standard question... "If you found out your the entire apparatus of your employer up to the very top was corrupt and conducting illegal acts, and then lying to Congress about it. Would you keep quiet and participate in those criminal acts in violation of the law and the constitution?
Lol... reminds me of those ethics tests they make people take for retail jobs. Where the "right" answers are to be a sociopath freak.
"Suppose there is a coworker you were friends with, lived through a kidnapping with, and who is the god parent to your children and the best man at your wedding, and is in your opinion an excellent employee. Now if they were in a car accident, and he's running a touch late. He calls you from the parking lot as he's rushing in and asks you to punch them in so they would not appear to be late... would you:
a) clock him in early
b) stay out of it
c) promptly report that he asked you to clock him in on time to your manager, and testify for the company against him when we sue him for the attempt to commit fraud?
Company Answer sheet:
a = wrong answer, automatic fail, and you are a worthless criminal
b = wrong answer
c = correct, this is the exactly the kind of people we want as employees. Just think, your new boss passed this test!! We bet you are looking to work with such ethical people!
Right. That's always been a problem with TVs... they jam the better displays with junk i don't need. Me, I just want a big ass screen that's really good at being a big ass screen. It doesn't need speakers - i have the TV muted. It certainly doesn't need apps - its not even on the network. Hell, it doesn't need 3 composite inputs and 4 hdmi ports and coax, and 2 RCA input groups...
I have it connected to a receiver, and all my stuff goes into that. One HDMI cable connects to the TV.
But they don't make that TV. So I buy one with a bunch of extra crap, speakers, and apps, and then never use any of it.
Even so, I'm quite happy with my TV.
One solution to quite a few of these problems is a USB dongle that holds the keys and handles the actual encryption.
aka... TPM / Trusted Computing. you don't even need the usb device.
That would indeed go a long way towards solving the problem, provided we get to control the keys. Alas TPM / TC is subverted by the content creation industry... so they "own" the platform instead of us for the most part. But in terms of the tech itself, its a solution that already exists if we just had the willpower to take control of it.
But even a usb based encryption solution doesn't render using a web app / web service safe, because the javascript can just slurp the decrypted content coming out of the device and pass it up to whoever. Using a web app REQUIRES trust of the service provider, because they control the client.
You can use a service provider without trusting them, provided you can supply your own client. Its not enough to provide your own usb/hardware encryption ... you have to control the client itself. The decrypted content must not enter the control of something the service provider controls.
It does not get you the whole way there. But I sure makes it harder for the NSA.
For a service outside the jurisdiction of the NSA or other opressive govt agency yes, I agree, but its not just the NSA.
At the end of the day, client side keys manipulated by javascript via local storage require trusting the service provider not to slurp them from me. I want a solution that doesn't require that trust.
So on a technological level you can simply increase the time the javscript files are cached and have some external monitoring for changes.
Again, the service provider controls this. I have to trust the service provider.
But there is still a way between not trusting anyone and auditing everything yourself and sending unencrypted mails that everybody can read.
Agreed. And the way to that is to separate the client doing the encryption/decryption and message presentation and editing from service provider doing the transport and remote storage.
Just as I don't need to trust my ISP to make a certificates based HTTPS SSL/TLS connections to a remote server with offline key exchange done in advance. The ISP don't hold the private keys. They can't MITM me. They can't slurp data from out of the browser via javascript unless they can get me to download a maliciously altered browser. The NSA can tap my ISP all they want, but unless they compromise me or the remote server or have cracked the encryption itself they can store all the gibberish they like. That is the reasonable compromise.
HTML5 local storage of private keys accessed by a web app is not. That's the equivalent of not trusting the cleaning service to have a copy of your front door keys... so you have them use a key you leave under the welcome mat instead, and tell them not to take it or make copies. If you don't trust the cleaning service... this is not a step "forward".
On a political level: I live in Germany. The NSA cannot tell me anything. And Germany had two of the worst terror regimes in the last century. I don't think people here would tolerate being treated like you are now.
I'm not an American either, nor am I in America. As far as the NSA is concerned, that makes my communications completely fair game... even if the USA gets its act together in terms of warrants and secret courts that's just "domestic surveillance of American citizens" you and I are the "legitimate targets of the NSA" in the sense that the NSA doesn't even have the perfunctory hassle of even hypothetically needing a pretense to monitor everything we say.
There is e-mail monitoring in Germany, but it's based on laws and courts that are not secret.
Unless its not. Because if its being done in secret, then by definition you don't know.
Getting paranoid does not help anybody. It just prevents you from acting, because there is no completely safe way to communicate.
Except there is. We already have the technology. HTTPS with SSL/TLS using self-signed certificates exchanged via offline channels.
And it works because of the division of responsibility. Our ISP is not our client (browser in that case) provider. If we were all AOL subscribers, using AOL browser, then we'd be boned.
1.) This is not true. You can design a mail system to store the private key on the client (html5 local storage).
Until I have some sort of assurance that the key stored in local storage, can't be sent up to the server by javascript then this gets me no where.
The NSA asks your mail service for the keys. The mail service says we don't have them... html5 local storage. NSA says ... add this line of javascript to your site. Next time I log in they have my key, and everyone else who accessed the site during that interval.
And even if we build a whole new spec with a wall of protection around the key, so the javascript just sends the encrypted text in and gets the decrypted key out and never gets its hand on the keys only then will the key be safe.
But any messages I access still are not. Because as long as I'm relying on javascript downloaded from the service to display the messages, I am vulnerable to that javascript being updated and sending that message back up to the server.
The client cannot be provided on demand by the server to have a hope in hell of being safe. Really it needs to be 3rd party, open source, audited by more 3rd parties, and the binaries I install.. well I don't... I download the source and compile it myself after checking that the hashes match the original and the 3rd party auditors. And even then, I have to trust that the NSA didn't get to everyone and conspire to publish malicious source. So to be truly safe, I have to audit it myself.
Real security from the likes of the NSA is HARD.
3.) Not true. See 1. If you authenticate using a private key you only need the password to decrypt the key and no username anymore.
True but you underestimate how little tolerance the average person has for passwords. An awful large number of people don't have login passwords to their computers and fewer still on their phones. And their mail passwords are remembered by the software so they don't have to enter them.
I've always wondered why this isn't better integrated/more automatic when it comes to email systems (gmail?)
3 reasons
1) Technical - gmail needs to have your private key to decrypt messages sent to you with your public key. Or to sign messages sent by you with your private key. They absolutely cannot offer a webmail service, if they can't descrypt your mail to show it to you over the web. If gmail has your private key, its not a very private key. The NSA can just quietly ask google for the key.
2) Business - gmail wants to mine your data. They can't do that if they can't read it. The business model of gmail is incompatible with providing a service where they can't read your data.
3) Conveniencel - having to enter pass phrases all the time is a chore. Nobody wants to do it.
Color my cynical but I see all this hype with 3D TV and movies and cable companies looking at these silly things as a way to extort money from $50 a month to $199 for HD. WIth 4K HD here comes $499 a month, now add conference rooms and TV makers, ... oh I guess greenRay DVDs are needed so now Sony can make even MORE $$$ for these etc. Sadly idiots wil pay for these too and then wonder how they are just barely making it with their middle class salaries and how they could have bought a brand new car for the monthly bills they keep paying for such garbage with minor improvements of what they had.
Just because they make it, doesn't mean wel'll buy it.
3DTV is probably here to stay, but not a lot of people are upgrading TVs just to get 3D. And 3D media is fairly scarce and largely irrelevant. Even the TV salesmen will admit that 3D is a flop. Nobody with a 60" edge lit LCD from 3 years ago is even slightly interested in upgrading to 3D. The only people buying them are people upgrading from CRT, upgrading from a smaller TV, or who have a older LCDs/Plasmas/DLPs that are dying. And they are buying them because it doesn't cost any more than a TV without 3D.
4K HD... I'm looking forward to that one with respect to computer displays etc, but I doubt a lot of people care for TV. I doubt it'll gain traction as a must have upgrade, and will instead become like 3DTV... where everyone buying a new TV will end up with it once its no more expensive than buying a TV without it. And half or more of them will never be used with any 4K content anyway for years to come.
oh I guess greenRay DVDs are needed
Blu ray launched just in time for the disc market to collapse as people switched to streaming. I doubt a greenRay tech will ever see the light of day as consumer disc media for movies. Most people are satisfied with streaming stuff at lower quality than DVD, nevermind bluray... the content market for 4HD just doesn't exist no matter how badly the gear industry wants one. Meanwhile the broadcasters don't have the bandwidth for it. The movie rental places have nearly disappeared. The movie stores are struggling and diversifying away from movies.
We'll get 4HD gear sooner than later, and 4HD content eventually, I'm sure, but its going to take some amazing marketing to convince us we need it enough to upgrade.