> BTW: some of the greatest benefactors from legalized gaming are Indian tribes.
That sounds like a pretty racist thing to consider.
> States collect sinfully large sums of money from taxing alcohol, tobacco, and yes, gambling.
Given that all of these things are addictive, you could say that the state is, in fact, profiteering off the individuals whose choices leave them, often, in position to afford it the least. Gives new meaning to "sin tax".
> Well, people are gonna drink, smoke, and gamble anyway! (Prohibition was a failure. And how's "The War On Drugs" > coming along?)
I certainly know that I prefer my drinking, drugging, and gambling with a slight hint of the danger of being robbed or stabbed, and I LOVE paying the premium required to get other people to take the risks of providing me these indulgences. If only they would prohibit alcohol again, so I could risk blindness on imitation hooch! Now THAT is a good time!
> And who are these casinos? Many are public corporations owned by stockholders, including unions and pension funds.
Very very true. So essentially, by betting on black, you are saving for retirement! Almost makes me wanna head to vegas now. Though, I don't think they have any shortage of takers on that bet.
Well lets also not forget, the claim is that subject matter matters. People were no better than random for non-sexual imagery. Being able to select which window will show you porn, or, by extension, possibly which girl at the bar is going to sleep with you tonight, with a 3% greater accuracy than would be expected, is nice...
However.... its not going to help you beat the casino.
Do what you want i guess but, it bothers me that someone would change a story to fit their own sensibilities, and then try to pass it off as something that its not. What its not, is Huckleberry Fin by Mark Twain. Whats even worst, is that someone would give this to a child, and tell them "here is huckelberry fin, by mark twain". Its not true...its your redacted version of Huckleberry Fin BASED ON the writings of Mark Twain.
Its not censorship... its fraud.
You want to update stuff? Fine. Hell update stuff, just don't try to tell me that Shakespear's Juliet said "Romeo, why are you a montegue. Disown your family and change your name, or tell me you love me and I will"
and Romeo certainly didn't say "Juiliet is is as beautiful as the sun"
Call it your updated version fine, but, don't blame Shakespear for shit.
Speak for your school. My High School covered all sorts of things. We had a teacher that made a point to make sure we understood... the "Emancipation Proclamation, on the day that it was passed, did not free a single slave".. and that the 3 slave holding states, still in the union, along with any that rejoined before the stated date, were exempt from losing their slaves.
We also covered such gems as the fact that the Viet Nam war started over the SOUTH's refusal to hold an election as agreed, because... they were afraid Ho Chi Mihn would win (how democratic of them). Let's not forget Washington's disastrous second term.... or that for a period of several years (after the war, and before the ratification of the Articles of Confederation) there was no unifying government between the states.
I wish I could remember if we covered Shay's rebellion, its become one of my favorite ones to remind people of.
I hear the teacher did an excellent class on the 1960s, but that was an elective, and by senior year I was more interested in taking 2 sciences than a history course.
> We have stood on the shoulders of the works of very brilliant philosophers and thinkers to get where we > are today. Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments. > And we all know that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the ones we already > ttried (thank you, Churchill).
I was recently playing Armchair Prognosticator with a friend. I had been thinking about Africa, how the people (in many areas) have "nowhere to go but up" in terms of technology. But also, how years of projects trying to make sustainable, small scale, reproducible technology for small African villiages has actually meant that many small villiages are using solar panels and other forms of energy.
My prediction was that once these sorts of devices spread to a critical mass, intelligent people there, learning to use these things, finding new uses for them, will eventually lead to an explosion and exponential improvement over there.
MY friend simply pointed out that he wouldn't expect it because its no tlike africans are producing this stuff, they are just standing on the rest of the worlds shoulders as more consumers. However, isn't that what we all are? I live in a nice house with electricity and running water because... people before me built that shit, built the infrastructure. I didn't do it. I stand on their shoulders.
yah that is alot of why I went for the droid2. I really liked the physical keyboard. Honestly, I am only so so on the touch screen stuff, its very clumsy for me, might work better if I had smaller fingers but, not much that I can do about that.... short of going to work with the bench grinder and honestly, that seems like overkill.
Ahh but they did find (realize, I don't believe this shit, but I have to play devil's advocate here) that subject matter mattered. Maybe the human mind is so specifically in "tune" with sexual imagery? Perhaps such a small number of people are "in tune" with the sorts of information that is useful in gambling that these "slightly lucky people" just... seem like exactly that?
With such small effects, and a lock in on subject matter, it really does make it hard to generalize as to what the effects of such a finding would be. The ability to "precognitively" sense sexual imagry isn't really helpful in any games that I know... well... unless you count picking up sex partners at parties.
I use connectbot I haven't done tunneling, but it has the option.
Admittedly, I seldom do any ssh via the phone, its a last resort backup for me. Came in really handy while I was de-racking a machine that I was removing from colo, and there wasn't a crash cart in sight. I just ssh'd in and halted the machine. Aside from that, I seldom use it.
That assumes perfect precognition. The effects that I saw claimed were more like, 3% better than random.
For a number of casino games, with "perfect play" (perfect not including black jack card counting, even though it should) the casino advantage is in that range usually. In fact, I believe the payout on slot machines is often close to 98%, again depending on the play. (some of the really pathalogically bad bets give the house much better odds)
So, maybe these people DO hit up casinos, and... don't even know it. They just seem to have a bit more luck than everyone else, and come out just a bit up. Of course, one claim that I didn't see (have seen other articles on this) is that individuals have precognition. Perhaps everybody has just a tiny bit of it.
Now, more likely... these are statistical anomalies. Frankly, I wouldn't doubt that he knows that and is trying to make a point.
Maybe this is a hack. They say he has a sense of humor.... think of this... he did design his studies well, at least the ones that I have read about. The effects of this "time leaking" are fairly small. Perhaps the entire point...is to make a point about statistics.
Added bonus? Put the ESP issue to bed. Him doing this, and specifically doing it so publicly and getting it passed peer review and publication, ENSURES that these studies are going to be replicated by numerous people, for the next several years. That, in and of itself, could produce enough evidence against ESP to really put the issue to bed:)
Say what you want about his paper, the effects reported are as large as many "well accepted" study results. Which may be the scariest part of all.
That said, I am no ESP believer (that may be obvious) but, some of the statements that are made against it are ridiculous too. "Why aren't people winning the lottory with their perfect precognition". The effects he is talking about here are on the order of a few percentage points better than random... which is more than the house advantage at many casino games (assuming optimal play)
> All people really should encrypt their computers, period. Especially if it's a > laptop. > > Simply so they don't have to worry about people walking off with access to > every single thing they've ever had access to online. Or that idiots won't > rummage through your mail when you're out of the room.
Preaching to the choir there. I have had a laptop stolen (maybe 8 years ago?). The saving grace is that it was running Linux, so whoever stole it, probably said "WTF is this" and immediately installed windows. That was years ago, these days, I see entirely non-technical people running Ubuntu (rare but, less so than it used to be)
Then again, I am also the weirdo that occasionally suggests to the guys in information security that we should transparent proxy all outbound tcp connections through tor... obviously to protect the organization, as a whole. (really just to see their reactions)
Actually I mention nicotine mostly because its so trivially easy to get a hold of, and its pretty effective. Actually, some tobacco tea (leaves soaked in water) works great as an insecticide (used it a few times) though, I wouldn't use it on anything susceptible to tobacco mosaic virus for obvious reasons:)
Also, a sufficient dose of nicotine to kill you, I would think, would get you pretty damned high. At least, I get high when I smoke it, but I also smoke like, a pack a decade. I have to imagine that such a dose would get even an experienced smoker high.
I knew a guy who tried to kill himself with barbiturates. Of course, like many who have tried it, he simply woke up 3 days later with the hangover of his life (I forget if he was in a hospital bed, or woke up on the floor).
Actually, I hear that, drowning is (after the initial period of choking on water as the lungs fill) quite pleasant. Most of the pain from such deaths comes from the response that the lungs have to the buildup of CO2. When filled with water, that doesn't happen.
Not that I recommend any of this. These are really just the tidbits I remember from my very brief teenager fascination with death and suicide.
I think my "favorite" method involved jumping off a bridge with various lengths of piano wire and rope tied strategically to leave an artistic display as the decent causes each length of wire to go taught and rip off a limb on the decent. (no idea if its been done or if it would work as advertised).
Ahh the RMV, gotta love the MA RMV. And by love, I mean, love in that "I am afraid that if I leave him, he will kill me and burn down my mother's house" kind of love.
they got me good a few years back. They decided, not too long before my birthday, to stop sending mail about upcoming expirations. So, I didn't ever bother to worry about my registration and license expiring... I knew they always send a renewal form in the mail a month or two before they expire (for those non Massholes out there, MA drivers licenses expire on your birthday).
So, I found out that my license was expired when I was pulled over for having a tail light out, on my motorcycle, out of state. I believe my response to "Were you aware that your license has expired" was "you have got to be shitting me".
Of course, my car registration had also expired, didn't thing to check that, so right after I got the license sorted out, I got pulled over for having the expired registration.
As an added bonus, I then got a ticket for not having the registration in the car (never mind that all cruisers have computers and they look it up anyway, no matter what)... and those 3 violations were 3 of the 5 violations that sent me to "Defensive Driving School". The other 2? Came from a single 5 mph fender bender where some pissed off old guy insisted on calling the cops and having me ticketed for our no damage tap in heavy traffic.... accident + ticket = 2 violations.
I was absolutely bullshit about having to go to that worthless course. And yes... worthless touchey feely mumbo jumbo that had little to no impact on driving.
> No, I suspect that he thinks installing a new OS will hide the fact that you > ever encrypted the drive to start with.
Nope, not exactly. Besides, unless you do some cute things like playing with system time and installing from old disks, its trivial to show that you recently reinstalled. Not to mention the lack of any evidence of activity on the machine.
Actually you got to my reasoning: > Almost all encryption takes the password you type in, and encrypts and decrypts > a different key with it, which is then used to on the rest of the drive. They > store this key at the start. If you overwrite it, it is utterly impossible for > you to ever give up the password. (Or, rather, you can give up the password, > and still no one can read any files, because all the password did was decrypt > what you overwrote already.)
Exactly. Reinstalling is really to perform 2 functions. 1. to make sure that the keys are gone and the data cannot be recovered 2. to make the system usable so that you can continue to use it in the mean time.
> Now, that's not quite the same as installing an OS, as it's clear you did have > something you wished to hide on the drive...but they can't hold you in contempt > for failing to reveal it, as you literally cannot reveal it.
My work could (in theory, if never practice) involve handling medical data, so I have to (by law) encrypt my drive, and have done so for several years now.. and have been a sideline encryption geek for a while now, so I maybe I was wrong to assume this part was obvious.
All fine except, as I pointed out to several others who brought variations on this up: You don't HAVE the key. You have the passphrase to unlock the keyslot. (talking luks here).
So, once the block that defines the key slots is gone, the key is gone. Give them the passphrase all you want, the passphrase is useless due to that level of indirection (which exists to allow for multiple users to each have their own passphrase for the same decryption key)
Reinstalling the OS is overkill, once that block is gone, its gone. The point of the reinstall was just to make the machine usable in the mean time.
So yah, even if they torture you, still no help, you couldn't help them if you wanted to...and I am sure they can make you want to.
Yes, extreme. Why destroy media when you just need to destroy the encryption keys?
I mean, it certainly doesn't work for everything, but, where you can, with a little setup ahead of time... its quite doable.
Shit, I do it just so that anyone who steals my laptop doesn't get my personal data. Wouldn't be the first time I had a laptop stolen, so I figure its worth doing.... but if I did need to wipe it because I had done something and the blue lights were at my window... I would feel perfectly secure issuing a "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda" and walking away. Within seconds it would be too late to recover anything from the disk... even with my passphrase.
What if you don't have the key? A luks passphrase maps to a key slot, and is used to decrypt the real key. This allows for multiple passphrases to unlock the same drive (say, for multiple users).
Once that data is gone, the passphrase is useless, you can give it to them, they still can't use it.
Once you reinstall the OS, you are writing over the luks information. Doing this destroys the keys. Give out the passphrase all you want, there is no key to unlock. It is useless.
They can't force you to give them a key that doesn't exist anymore.
Reinstalling the OS is simply a matter of keeping the machine usable. Usually data forensics work is done by imaging the drives anyway.
My point was, if the whole device is encrypted then simply zeroing out the blocks that hold the LUKS information is equivalent to wiping the disk. Once that is gone, even giving up the pass phrase isn't good enough, there is simply no key to unlock anymore.
Why destroy media when you can leave the media usable, AND get the same effect.
Actually, if he just claimed that she killed herself, I could see her wanting to erase it to not leave it looking like he might have done it, or to cast some doubt on what may have happened.
However, when he adds in that she was trying to "Frame him"? That is going a bit far and falls into the category of protesting too much
I was curious about this...particularly what it means to "reverse the polarity of a swimming pool"... um, I didn't know they had poles:) (clearly something to do with the wiring...)
Apparently its an interesting case. I haven't read much yet, about to dive in, but, it does quickly raise the question of... who did the searching? Looks like the defense claim is suicide. I know that if I planed to kill myself by a posion, I would want to know quite a bit about how it worked and what to expect.
Though, I am not sure thats the one I would choose.... nicotine maybe.... or nitrous oxide... glycol tastes sweet if I remember, its why dogs sometimes die from drinking antifreeze, so seems like a good choice to slip in food or drink... so... hard to say. Have to read...
Drill press? Do you know how easy it is to encrypt a drive?
Not that I would trust that alone but, if you do a reinstall of the OS over an encrypted drive, nobody is recovering what was there previously. Why bother with the theatrics, and expense. Not to mention, that the holes in the drives may not prove much, but they tell them you are hiding something.
Besides, its hard to get to work in the morning without breaking ANY law. How would you even know? You could be violating the law RIGHT NOW just by reading this. In fact, you probably are in some jurisdiction. Who is to say that jurisdictions law doesn't apply to you right now? Try explaining why it doesn't apply after they have picked you up while you are there on vacation.
Ridiculous? Absolutely, but the point is, the world is a big and complicated place full of lots of laws. Luckily, you can get away with ignoring the vast majority of them, most of the time. However, those few that they really have sticks up their ass about, like murder, honestly, its pretty wrong anyway so start with not doing it.
Anything that is not so wrong, but, still illegal, and they still have sticks up their ass about... well... chances are you have time to plan more and encrypted drives should just make sense. I mean shit, the Ubuntu installer had it as an option, last I looked. Also, he can delete all he wants, as long as they can find the right cookies they can probably recreate much of your search history. Really just best not to rely on clearing the cache.
> It was easier to measure then, because performance was directly related to clock rate. Now that clock > has stopped going up, performance depends on parallel processing.
Very true, but, is it still "Moore's Law" if you reformulate it to take new paradigms into account? When Einstein adopted the Lorentz Transformations to describe relative motion, nobody referred to those equations as "Newton's Laws".
Its splitting hairs but, I don't think its all that useful to call a "law" anyway. I always thought of it more of a "rule of thumb". As such, it is still useful. If I have a workload that runs slow today, I know that that isn't a total killer, because, 2 years or so down the line, I can expect to have machines that can do the same workload faster (or take on a bigger one).
In those terms, "Moore's Law", as long as you don't try to get too specific with it, works ok. Its also good for explaining things to non-technical people when they want an idea of a comparison between their old machine and a brand new one.... again... accuracy and precision are not important here, just, a general ballpark.
For that, I think its great, and I use it that way. However that said... there is no reason to expect it wont change. Like, I fully expect that if some major national government decided to utterly pour resources into the problem we would start seeing that doubling time climbing to 4 or 6 or even 8 years!:)
Using drug cases as an excuse to pry further and further into peoples personal lives is... pretty typical. When the war is on human appetite, the fight must naturally extend to all places where people feed those appetites.
Now, if they can search an arrestee's phone, and that phone is connected to the internet, does that mean, they can.... search the internet too?!!
Slashdot Mirror
> BTW: some of the greatest benefactors from legalized gaming are Indian tribes.
That sounds like a pretty racist thing to consider.
> States collect sinfully large sums of money from taxing alcohol, tobacco, and yes, gambling.
Given that all of these things are addictive, you could say that the state is, in fact, profiteering off the individuals whose choices leave them, often, in position to afford it the least. Gives new meaning to "sin tax".
> Well, people are gonna drink, smoke, and gamble anyway! (Prohibition was a failure. And how's "The War On Drugs"
> coming along?)
I certainly know that I prefer my drinking, drugging, and gambling with a slight hint of the danger of being robbed or stabbed, and I LOVE paying the premium required to get other people to take the risks of providing me these indulgences. If only they would prohibit alcohol again, so I could risk blindness on imitation hooch! Now THAT is a good time!
> And who are these casinos? Many are public corporations owned by stockholders, including unions and pension funds.
Very very true. So essentially, by betting on black, you are saving for retirement! Almost makes me wanna head to vegas now. Though, I don't think they have any shortage of takers on that bet.
-Steve
Well lets also not forget, the claim is that subject matter matters. People were no better than random for non-sexual imagery. Being able to select which window will show you porn, or, by extension, possibly which girl at the bar is going to sleep with you tonight, with a 3% greater accuracy than would be expected, is nice...
However.... its not going to help you beat the casino.
-Steve
Do what you want i guess but, it bothers me that someone would change a story to fit their own sensibilities, and then try to pass it off as something that its not. What its not, is Huckleberry Fin by Mark Twain. Whats even worst, is that someone would give this to a child, and tell them "here is huckelberry fin, by mark twain". Its not true...its your redacted version of Huckleberry Fin BASED ON the writings of Mark Twain.
Its not censorship... its fraud.
You want to update stuff? Fine. Hell update stuff, just don't try to tell me that Shakespear's Juliet said "Romeo, why are you a montegue. Disown your family and change your name, or tell me you love me and I will"
and Romeo certainly didn't say "Juiliet is is as beautiful as the sun"
Call it your updated version fine, but, don't blame Shakespear for shit.
-Steve
Speak for your school. My High School covered all sorts of things. We had a teacher that made a point to make sure we understood... the "Emancipation Proclamation, on the day that it was passed, did not free a single slave".. and that the 3 slave holding states, still in the union, along with any that rejoined before the stated date, were exempt from losing their slaves.
We also covered such gems as the fact that the Viet Nam war started over the SOUTH's refusal to hold an election as agreed, because... they were afraid Ho Chi Mihn would win (how democratic of them). Let's not forget Washington's disastrous second term.... or that for a period of several years (after the war, and before the ratification of the Articles of Confederation) there was no unifying government between the states.
I wish I could remember if we covered Shay's rebellion, its become one of my favorite ones to remind people of.
I hear the teacher did an excellent class on the 1960s, but that was an elective, and by senior year I was more interested in taking 2 sciences than a history course.
How do you know what our enemies prefer? You must be in league with Goldstein! Traitor!
> We have stood on the shoulders of the works of very brilliant philosophers and thinkers to get where we
> are today. Fascism has slowly been phased out in favor of more liberal and democratic governments.
> And we all know that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the ones we already
> ttried (thank you, Churchill).
I was recently playing Armchair Prognosticator with a friend. I had been thinking about Africa, how the people (in many areas) have "nowhere to go but up" in terms of technology. But also, how years of projects trying to make sustainable, small scale, reproducible technology for small African villiages has actually meant that many small villiages are using solar panels and other forms of energy.
My prediction was that once these sorts of devices spread to a critical mass, intelligent people there, learning to use these things, finding new uses for them, will eventually lead to an explosion and exponential improvement over there.
MY friend simply pointed out that he wouldn't expect it because its no tlike africans are producing this stuff, they are just standing on the rest of the worlds shoulders as more consumers. However, isn't that what we all are? I live in a nice house with electricity and running water because... people before me built that shit, built the infrastructure. I didn't do it. I stand on their shoulders.
-Steve
yah that is alot of why I went for the droid2. I really liked the physical keyboard. Honestly, I am only so so on the touch screen stuff, its very clumsy for me, might work better if I had smaller fingers but, not much that I can do about that.... short of going to work with the bench grinder and honestly, that seems like overkill.
-Steve
Ahh but they did find (realize, I don't believe this shit, but I have to play devil's advocate here) that subject matter mattered. Maybe the human mind is so specifically in "tune" with sexual imagery? Perhaps such a small number of people are "in tune" with the sorts of information that is useful in gambling that these "slightly lucky people" just... seem like exactly that?
With such small effects, and a lock in on subject matter, it really does make it hard to generalize as to what the effects of such a finding would be. The ability to "precognitively" sense sexual imagry isn't really helpful in any games that I know... well... unless you count picking up sex partners at parties.
-Steve
I use connectbot I haven't done tunneling, but it has the option.
Admittedly, I seldom do any ssh via the phone, its a last resort backup for me. Came in really handy while I was de-racking a machine that I was removing from colo, and there wasn't a crash cart in sight. I just ssh'd in and halted the machine. Aside from that, I seldom use it.
That assumes perfect precognition. The effects that I saw claimed were more like, 3% better than random.
For a number of casino games, with "perfect play" (perfect not including black jack card counting, even though it should) the casino advantage is in that range usually. In fact, I believe the payout on slot machines is often close to 98%, again depending on the play. (some of the really pathalogically bad bets give the house much better odds)
So, maybe these people DO hit up casinos, and... don't even know it. They just seem to have a bit more luck than everyone else, and come out just a bit up. Of course, one claim that I didn't see (have seen other articles on this) is that individuals have precognition. Perhaps everybody has just a tiny bit of it.
Now, more likely... these are statistical anomalies. Frankly, I wouldn't doubt that he knows that and is trying to make a point.
Maybe this is a hack. They say he has a sense of humor.... think of this... he did design his studies well, at least the ones that I have read about. The effects of this "time leaking" are fairly small. Perhaps the entire point...is to make a point about statistics.
Added bonus? Put the ESP issue to bed. Him doing this, and specifically doing it so publicly and getting it passed peer review and publication, ENSURES that these studies are going to be replicated by numerous people, for the next several years. That, in and of itself, could produce enough evidence against ESP to really put the issue to bed :)
Say what you want about his paper, the effects reported are as large as many "well accepted" study results. Which may be the scariest part of all.
That said, I am no ESP believer (that may be obvious) but, some of the statements that are made against it are ridiculous too. "Why aren't people winning the lottory with their perfect precognition". The effects he is talking about here are on the order of a few percentage points better than random... which is more than the house advantage at many casino games (assuming optimal play)
-Steve
> All people really should encrypt their computers, period. Especially if it's a
> laptop.
>
> Simply so they don't have to worry about people walking off with access to
> every single thing they've ever had access to online. Or that idiots won't
> rummage through your mail when you're out of the room.
Preaching to the choir there. I have had a laptop stolen (maybe 8 years ago?). The saving grace is that it was running Linux, so whoever stole it, probably said "WTF is this" and immediately installed windows. That was years ago, these days, I see entirely non-technical people running Ubuntu (rare but, less so than it used to be)
Then again, I am also the weirdo that occasionally suggests to the guys in information security that we should transparent proxy all outbound tcp connections through tor... obviously to protect the organization, as a whole.
(really just to see their reactions)
-Steve
Actually I mention nicotine mostly because its so trivially easy to get a hold of, and its pretty effective. Actually, some tobacco tea (leaves soaked in water) works great as an insecticide (used it a few times) though, I wouldn't use it on anything susceptible to tobacco mosaic virus for obvious reasons :)
Also, a sufficient dose of nicotine to kill you, I would think, would get you pretty damned high. At least, I get high when I smoke it, but I also smoke like, a pack a decade. I have to imagine that such a dose would get even an experienced smoker high.
I knew a guy who tried to kill himself with barbiturates. Of course, like many who have tried it, he simply woke up 3 days later with the hangover of his life (I forget if he was in a hospital bed, or woke up on the floor).
Actually, I hear that, drowning is (after the initial period of choking on water as the lungs fill) quite pleasant. Most of the pain from such deaths comes from the response that the lungs have to the buildup of CO2. When filled with water, that doesn't happen.
Not that I recommend any of this. These are really just the tidbits I remember from my very brief teenager fascination with death and suicide.
I think my "favorite" method involved jumping off a bridge with various lengths of piano wire and rope tied strategically to leave an artistic display as the decent causes each length of wire to go taught and rip off a limb on the decent. (no idea if its been done or if it would work as advertised).
Ahh the RMV, gotta love the MA RMV. And by love, I mean, love in that "I am afraid that if I leave him, he will kill me and burn down my mother's house" kind of love.
they got me good a few years back. They decided, not too long before my birthday, to stop sending mail about upcoming expirations. So, I didn't ever bother to worry about my registration and license expiring... I knew they always send a renewal form in the mail a month or two before they expire (for those non Massholes out there, MA drivers licenses expire on your birthday).
So, I found out that my license was expired when I was pulled over for having a tail light out, on my motorcycle, out of state. I believe my response to "Were you aware that your license has expired" was "you have got to be shitting me".
Of course, my car registration had also expired, didn't thing to check that, so right after I got the license sorted out, I got pulled over for having the expired registration.
As an added bonus, I then got a ticket for not having the registration in the car (never mind that all cruisers have computers and they look it up anyway, no matter what)... and those 3 violations were 3 of the 5 violations that sent me to "Defensive Driving School". The other 2? Came from a single 5 mph fender bender where some pissed off old guy insisted on calling the cops and having me ticketed for our no damage tap in heavy traffic.... accident + ticket = 2 violations.
I was absolutely bullshit about having to go to that worthless course. And yes... worthless touchey feely mumbo jumbo that had little to no impact on driving.
-Steve
> No, I suspect that he thinks installing a new OS will hide the fact that you
> ever encrypted the drive to start with.
Nope, not exactly. Besides, unless you do some cute things like playing with system time and installing from old disks, its trivial to show that you recently reinstalled. Not to mention the lack of any evidence of activity on the machine.
Actually you got to my reasoning:
> Almost all encryption takes the password you type in, and encrypts and decrypts
> a different key with it, which is then used to on the rest of the drive. They
> store this key at the start. If you overwrite it, it is utterly impossible for
> you to ever give up the password. (Or, rather, you can give up the password,
> and still no one can read any files, because all the password did was decrypt
> what you overwrote already.)
Exactly. Reinstalling is really to perform 2 functions. 1. to make sure that the keys are gone and the data cannot be recovered 2. to make the system usable so that you can continue to use it in the mean time.
> Now, that's not quite the same as installing an OS, as it's clear you did have
> something you wished to hide on the drive...but they can't hold you in contempt
> for failing to reveal it, as you literally cannot reveal it.
My work could (in theory, if never practice) involve handling medical data, so I have to (by law) encrypt my drive, and have done so for several years now.. and have been a sideline encryption geek for a while now, so I maybe I was wrong to assume this part was obvious.
-Steve
All fine except, as I pointed out to several others who brought variations on this up: You don't HAVE the key. You have the passphrase to unlock the keyslot. (talking luks here).
So, once the block that defines the key slots is gone, the key is gone. Give them the passphrase all you want, the passphrase is useless due to that level of indirection (which exists to allow for multiple users to each have their own passphrase for the same decryption key)
Reinstalling the OS is overkill, once that block is gone, its gone. The point of the reinstall was just to make the machine usable in the mean time.
So yah, even if they torture you, still no help, you couldn't help them if you wanted to...and I am sure they can make you want to.
-Steve
Yes, extreme. Why destroy media when you just need to destroy the encryption keys?
I mean, it certainly doesn't work for everything, but, where you can, with a little setup ahead of time... its quite doable.
Shit, I do it just so that anyone who steals my laptop doesn't get my personal data. Wouldn't be the first time I had a laptop stolen, so I figure its worth doing.... but if I did need to wipe it because I had done something and the blue lights were at my window... I would feel perfectly secure issuing a "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda" and walking away. Within seconds it would be too late to recover anything from the disk... even with my passphrase.
-Steve
What if you don't have the key? A luks passphrase maps to a key slot, and is used to decrypt the real key. This allows for multiple passphrases to unlock the same drive (say, for multiple users).
Once that data is gone, the passphrase is useless, you can give it to them, they still can't use it.
Once you reinstall the OS, you are writing over the luks information. Doing this destroys the keys. Give out the passphrase all you want, there is no key to unlock. It is useless.
They can't force you to give them a key that doesn't exist anymore.
-Steve
No you are missing my point.
Reinstalling the OS is simply a matter of keeping the machine usable. Usually data forensics work is done by imaging the drives anyway.
My point was, if the whole device is encrypted then simply zeroing out the blocks that hold the LUKS information is equivalent to wiping the disk. Once that is gone, even giving up the pass phrase isn't good enough, there is simply no key to unlock anymore.
Why destroy media when you can leave the media usable, AND get the same effect.
-Steve
Oh yah totally... this one stinks to high heaven.
Actually, if he just claimed that she killed herself, I could see her wanting to erase it to not leave it looking like he might have done it, or to cast some doubt on what may have happened.
However, when he adds in that she was trying to "Frame him"? That is going a bit far and falls into the category of protesting too much
-Steve
I was curious about this...particularly what it means to "reverse the polarity of a swimming pool"... um, I didn't know they had poles :) (clearly something to do with the wiring...)
Anyway: http://volokh.com/2011/01/04/interesting-example-of-the-use-of-computer-search-evidence
Apparently its an interesting case. I haven't read much yet, about to dive in, but, it does quickly raise the question of... who did the searching? Looks like the defense claim is suicide. I know that if I planed to kill myself by a posion, I would want to know quite a bit about how it worked and what to expect.
Though, I am not sure thats the one I would choose.... nicotine maybe.... or nitrous oxide... glycol tastes sweet if I remember, its why dogs sometimes die from drinking antifreeze, so seems like a good choice to slip in food or drink... so... hard to say. Have to read...
-Steve
Drill press? Do you know how easy it is to encrypt a drive?
Not that I would trust that alone but, if you do a reinstall of the OS over an encrypted drive, nobody is recovering what was there previously. Why bother with the theatrics, and expense. Not to mention, that the holes in the drives may not prove much, but they tell them you are hiding something.
Besides, its hard to get to work in the morning without breaking ANY law. How would you even know? You could be violating the law RIGHT NOW just by reading this. In fact, you probably are in some jurisdiction. Who is to say that jurisdictions law doesn't apply to you right now? Try explaining why it doesn't apply after they have picked you up while you are there on vacation.
Ridiculous? Absolutely, but the point is, the world is a big and complicated place full of lots of laws. Luckily, you can get away with ignoring the vast majority of them, most of the time. However, those few that they really have sticks up their ass about, like murder, honestly, its pretty wrong anyway so start with not doing it.
Anything that is not so wrong, but, still illegal, and they still have sticks up their ass about... well... chances are you have time to plan more and encrypted drives should just make sense. I mean shit, the Ubuntu installer had it as an option, last I looked. Also, he can delete all he wants, as long as they can find the right cookies they can probably recreate much of your search history. Really just best not to rely on clearing the cache.
-Steve
> It was easier to measure then, because performance was directly related to clock rate. Now that clock
> has stopped going up, performance depends on parallel processing.
Very true, but, is it still "Moore's Law" if you reformulate it to take new paradigms into account? When Einstein adopted the Lorentz Transformations to describe relative motion, nobody referred to those equations as "Newton's Laws".
Its splitting hairs but, I don't think its all that useful to call a "law" anyway. I always thought of it more of a "rule of thumb". As such, it is still useful. If I have a workload that runs slow today, I know that that isn't a total killer, because, 2 years or so down the line, I can expect to have machines that can do the same workload faster (or take on a bigger one).
In those terms, "Moore's Law", as long as you don't try to get too specific with it, works ok. Its also good for explaining things to non-technical people when they want an idea of a comparison between their old machine and a brand new one.... again... accuracy and precision are not important here, just, a general ballpark.
For that, I think its great, and I use it that way. However that said... there is no reason to expect it wont change. Like, I fully expect that if some major national government decided to utterly pour resources into the problem we would start seeing that doubling time climbing to 4 or 6 or even 8 years! :)
-Steve
lol Quite apt though....
Using drug cases as an excuse to pry further and further into peoples personal lives is... pretty typical. When the war is on human appetite, the fight must naturally extend to all places where people feed those appetites.
Now, if they can search an arrestee's phone, and that phone is connected to the internet, does that mean, they can.... search the internet too?!!
-Steve