Generally data is supplied in the form of disk images, and large binders full of reports. I have seen the stacks in a friend's office who did some forensics defense work. He basically got paid big bucks to load up images of people's files and explain technology to lawyers.
In fact, if you look back just a few weeks here on/. there was a story about exactly what you are saying....but.... the lawyer caught on and caught the police in the act.... he even said he had NEVER received evidence as physical equipment before, always images, which is why he was suspicious.
Oh if I had known enough at the time we would have. Unfortunately it happened a couple of times and she waited a while to tell me, mostly because she knew how mad it would make me and she was right, no sooner did she tell me than I was pulling out my phone and calling up their complaints department.
Pretty quickly they got me to someone at their police department who tried to justify the program etc. I did manage to make him go quiet for a second when I called it a jobs program, he just had nothing at that.
At some level you have to trust someone. Basically you "know" because wikileaks says so and you either trust that they know what they are talking about and telling the truth or you don't. They certainly have the technical chops to implement this sort of thing.
At some level you will never know, at some level, you take in info. If you go to submit and its not over tor, or the address of the service isn't publically published by a known source.... lots of things could tip you off but, in the end, its impossible to know for sure....but hopefully that is better than the alternative.
If anyone needs someone to talk on how intimidating such a situation can be, they can just ask my wife, she has ended up in situations like this a couple of times just trying to get to work.
Here in Boston the local public transit (MBTA) thugs have a serious TSA hard on. They actually run random bag swabbing checkpoints at stations. In theory, you can refuse and leave, walk right out. In practice, when my wife tried to say no, she had one officer yelling "we have a resistor" as she was suddenly surrounded by people telling her what to do and found herself being railroaded to the the swabber and into the station....so much for a right to refuse and walk out.
Its amazing how intimidating a gang of armed men yelling at you can be.
hmmmm one command not in history? How does that work? Do you use some special launcher for it?
Come to think of it, I do that too using a gnome app (cryptkeeper) but the cryptkeeper config still exists so it doesn't hide where the files are. Of course, its in my home dir which is already encrypted so, there is some defense in depth on that.
In the end, the drive still exists, you still have the data. If there is nothing there to find, you can always find a way to cooperate and use the data on the drive. However, this tool lets you do that at your option rather than at theirs.
Maybe, but, I like this better personally because its more immediate. "USB attached to the wrist" scenario is a clear winner because it means the system is shutting down before they even realize what just happened and they have little or no time to respond, there is precious little they can really do to prevent that stick from being pulled.
In the past a friend of mine and I were musing about a setup like this, but our idea was a bit more drastic and less portable.... no battery at all, and power wired to a switch that opens or closes with the door to the room, so just opening the door to the room would kill the system
Even back then I knew stealing was wrong.... but unauthorized writing of new files never bothered me.
So I used a race condition I found in the Macintosh security software at school and used it to copy icons of porn over all the desktop icons, so anyone trying to launch word got tits.
And of course, I did it as my person Senior year prank, on the way out the door when all the other classes still had a couple of weeks, on the last day for seniors I slipped unnoticed into the computer lab, did my deed, and slipped out, and walked out of the building.
They never suspected someone without the password did it (a bunch of people had the password of course).
I ran into some of the guys from the lower class years later and got a "wow that was you!"
The people who run these spies made a promise, that promise is known as the constitution and it places limits on their powers. They have every right to change that promise, but no right whatsoever to break it without changing it first.
It seems clear to me that all of this mass survillance is a massive violation of our right to be secure in our persons and effects. They have no right to implement ANYTHING which violates that promise without first changing the promise. Not even a little bit, not even for good reasons or to save lives.
> Harris forces it's gov customers to sign an NDA that essentially says they're not customers of Harris.
I take extreme issue with your use of the word "Force".
A person "Forced" to do something cannot be considered responsible for his actions, so if they are being "forced" that is a pretty serious accusation. Unless you have evidence of some manner of blackmail or threat, then I don't see how it can be applied.
They always had the option of backing out and not buying the equipment. Nobody was forced, they were accomplices.
Well if you are actually a congressman the answer is simple....you write all laws that apply to you and people like you such that the law itself specifically requires your understanding of it in order to break it. Most laws that apply specifically to lawmakers almost always contain words like "knowingly".
If you are not a lawmaker or one of their clients who pays for the law to be made....then its irrelevant, nobody gives a shit about you.
I suppose you expect we should all be as eager as you to give up all but the pretense of privacy because the bogeyman makes you piss your pants with fear?
um of course they would, that is why so much protection is built around the process.
That was one of the things that Manning talked about with the snitch Adrian Lamo; that the process was designed to blind wikileaks themselves from direct knowledge of the leaker's identity; because it would be a liability to everyone involved.
By not knowing, they have to take other measures to carefully validate leaked information since they can't rely on the credentials of a source. Its obviously a series of trade offs.
However, its really the only viable way to operate, since they know they can never ensure total security, the best thing they can do to protect their sources is to actually not know themselves.
Its very true, however, it is avoidable if you are willing to make trade offs.
For example, some of the server distros like RHEL don't often have that issue. The thing is, they don't update often except for security. Most desktop users will not be happy running something based off Fedora core 12 today; but on the server end, lots of people are still deploying on it just for that reason.
For me, I tend to have little problem with either Ubuntu or Debian....until I find I want newer stuff and start running testing or unstable distributions which....do break a lot more often than stable.
OTOH aside from existing regulations aimed at the business side, I don't see what is wrong from that persons perspective. In principle I have no issue with a service that allows people to, on a part time basis, give other people rides for a few bucks to make some spare income.
Why does everything need to be professional? I think the problem with amateurs providing services are mostly overblown.
Believe it or not, and I know not everyone complies with this, but I believe external markers are required (here in MA) on ANY vehicle with commercial plates. Note, of course, that no Uber driver is going to have commercial plates, and really shouldn't, generally people don't need commercial plates when they supply their own personal vehicle for the job. (imagine what that would do to pizza delivery)
Here is a nickle, kid, go tell someone who never had to go find another system to run a web browser on because the latest updated broke his XF86Config. (a version of which happened again recently when I wasn't paying attention and I allowed an update to uninstall the ati graphics driver packages....oops, always read those "to be removed" lists)
Every distro out there has managed some type of update breakage at some point, and if you run a full desktop you pretty much can't avoid it.
Though I did switch back to Debian myself because I didn't like the direction they were going with the Desktop and noticed Debian release cycles had shortened significantly since I switched.
My father had a hunting story about a gun like that, tho it was a single shot....
"....again I slowly put a round in the chamber and slowly lifted the gun back up, and for the third time raised the barrel even higher, this time I was just about aiming into the sky, I pulled the trigger.....and finally....grazed the deers belly and he ran off....if that was my gun, I would have wrapped it around a tree"
This, and so much this for just about every gun related cry for regulation.
I keep seeing people talk about high capacity magazines, assault rifles etc etc every time gun violence comes up. Oh we need to ban this, we need to background check that.... never mind that they are whipping themselves up into a froth about the least common categories of gun violence.
In the end, real crime, even the real heinous shit, tends to be done with either hand guns or hand held melee weapons. Almost nobody uses rifles for crimes, more hammers are used to kill than rifles....all rifles, assault or otherwise....but nearly every gun control nutter I talk seems to think every gun owners secret dream is to carry around an AK-47 all day.
In fact, so far the only real connection between gun laws and crime is, places with crime problems tend to make more gun laws as a result.... which doesn't do shit about their crime problems. The whole issue is only popular because its an easy sound bite "solution", you know, the kind that "always work" like banning drugs.
Hardcore is without mods? Lol! Depends on your mods man.
I was playing since before science mode existed so, by the time career came out, I found I could just monkey stomp the tech tree. I tend to run mods which add new game mechanics that add challenge. For example, Tac Life Support which means kerbals need supply of water, food, and oxygen and electricity.... that is one of the few things that kept me from early moon missions (solar panels are not available right away).
Construction time to add ship build time mechanics, Deadly Reentry for heating effects (might be obsolete now, at least partially), FAR for better aero (I hear its getting even better), RemoteTek to simulate antena range and signal delay, scansat for mapping/scanning features, cacteye for telescopes, realchute for better parachutes, stage recovery, KIDS to make thrust/throttle/ISP/altitude relationships to work more correctly (default KSP makes fuel consumption vary with atmospheric pressure instead of thrust, so throttle input relates to thrust not fuel usage, KIDS has options to fix that)....then once it is hardcore and good top it all off with Astronomer's visual pack to get clouds, auroras, dust storms, etc to make it real pretty.
Its not missing, its intentionally ignored for the sake of gameplay. Getting normal gamers up to speed on stable orbits with 2 body physics induces enough rage quits. The ability to easily have stable orbits is a bit more important than the neat tricks you can do with a better gravitational model.
I would love to be able to pull off tricky low energy tranfers and use multi-body gravitation to send ships on slow tours of the solar system for very little fuel costs, or put a satelite in a halo orbit.... fun stuff but.... nothing that I would want to trade stable orbits for.... the simplified physics makes it easier to get to a point where you understand it.
I really think paid mods are dumb, they will do little good other than encourage new modders, but, it will do it by giving them false hopes and setting them up for an antagonistic atmosphere. Look at Kerbal modders now for an example. They work together. There are few "competing" mods, most work with eachother, and when you see two modders working on similar or related mods meet in the forums it is always a "Oh you are the guy who does X? Awesome how did you do Y?" and they have a great conversation and work together a bit.
Enter paid mods, and they would have incentive to...not do that. You would have modders who just copy others and release trying to make a buck, you would have people trying to obscure code, and hide their "secret sauce".... all.... for a pittance that will never sustain them.
I run 30 kerbal mods now (and a similar number of skyrim ones). If mods started going paid, theres maybe 2 or 3 on each I would even consider continuing to use if they were even a $1 or 2....in fact, it would massively increase my resistance to even wanting to try a mod.
So the main thing it will do is mean a lot less mods get used.
Whats the difference? I let steam update it, and then copy it off to another directory for mod installs so I can keep a pristine copy around. Sometimes I make two copies so I can run different mod sets.
I see no issue here, plus I have steam already so why go anywhere else if I already use it? Don't really need an installer.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally data is supplied in the form of disk images, and large binders full of reports. I have seen the stacks in a friend's office who did some forensics defense work. He basically got paid big bucks to load up images of people's files and explain technology to lawyers.
In fact, if you look back just a few weeks here on /. there was a story about exactly what you are saying....but.... the lawyer caught on and caught the police in the act.... he even said he had NEVER received evidence as physical equipment before, always images, which is why he was suspicious.
Oh if I had known enough at the time we would have. Unfortunately it happened a couple of times and she waited a while to tell me, mostly because she knew how mad it would make me and she was right, no sooner did she tell me than I was pulling out my phone and calling up their complaints department.
Pretty quickly they got me to someone at their police department who tried to justify the program etc. I did manage to make him go quiet for a second when I called it a jobs program, he just had nothing at that.
How do you know anything?
Have you reflected much on trusting trust? http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/...
At some level you have to trust someone. Basically you "know" because wikileaks says so and you either trust that they know what they are talking about and telling the truth or you don't. They certainly have the technical chops to implement this sort of thing.
At some level you will never know, at some level, you take in info. If you go to submit and its not over tor, or the address of the service isn't publically published by a known source.... lots of things could tip you off but, in the end, its impossible to know for sure....but hopefully that is better than the alternative.
If anyone needs someone to talk on how intimidating such a situation can be, they can just ask my wife, she has ended up in situations like this a couple of times just trying to get to work.
Here in Boston the local public transit (MBTA) thugs have a serious TSA hard on. They actually run random bag swabbing checkpoints at stations. In theory, you can refuse and leave, walk right out. In practice, when my wife tried to say no, she had one officer yelling "we have a resistor" as she was suddenly surrounded by people telling her what to do and found herself being railroaded to the the swabber and into the station....so much for a right to refuse and walk out.
Its amazing how intimidating a gang of armed men yelling at you can be.
hmmmm one command not in history? How does that work? Do you use some special launcher for it?
Come to think of it, I do that too using a gnome app (cryptkeeper) but the cryptkeeper config still exists so it doesn't hide where the files are. Of course, its in my home dir which is already encrypted so, there is some defense in depth on that.
Actually there is no downside AT ALL to using it.
In the end, the drive still exists, you still have the data. If there is nothing there to find, you can always find a way to cooperate and use the data on the drive. However, this tool lets you do that at your option rather than at theirs.
Maybe, but, I like this better personally because its more immediate. "USB attached to the wrist" scenario is a clear winner because it means the system is shutting down before they even realize what just happened and they have little or no time to respond, there is precious little they can really do to prevent that stick from being pulled.
In the past a friend of mine and I were musing about a setup like this, but our idea was a bit more drastic and less portable.... no battery at all, and power wired to a switch that opens or closes with the door to the room, so just opening the door to the room would kill the system
Even back then I knew stealing was wrong.... but unauthorized writing of new files never bothered me.
So I used a race condition I found in the Macintosh security software at school and used it to copy icons of porn over all the desktop icons, so anyone trying to launch word got tits.
And of course, I did it as my person Senior year prank, on the way out the door when all the other classes still had a couple of weeks, on the last day for seniors I slipped unnoticed into the computer lab, did my deed, and slipped out, and walked out of the building.
They never suspected someone without the password did it (a bunch of people had the password of course).
I ran into some of the guys from the lower class years later and got a "wow that was you!"
Irrelevant really.
The people who run these spies made a promise, that promise is known as the constitution and it places limits on their powers. They have every right to change that promise, but no right whatsoever to break it without changing it first.
It seems clear to me that all of this mass survillance is a massive violation of our right to be secure in our persons and effects. They have no right to implement ANYTHING which violates that promise without first changing the promise. Not even a little bit, not even for good reasons or to save lives.
> Harris forces it's gov customers to sign an NDA that essentially says they're not customers of Harris.
I take extreme issue with your use of the word "Force".
A person "Forced" to do something cannot be considered responsible for his actions, so if they are being "forced" that is a pretty serious accusation. Unless you have evidence of some manner of blackmail or threat, then I don't see how it can be applied.
They always had the option of backing out and not buying the equipment. Nobody was forced, they were accomplices.
Well if you are actually a congressman the answer is simple....you write all laws that apply to you and people like you such that the law itself specifically requires your understanding of it in order to break it. Most laws that apply specifically to lawmakers almost always contain words like "knowingly".
If you are not a lawmaker or one of their clients who pays for the law to be made....then its irrelevant, nobody gives a shit about you.
This is perhaps the best extension of a metaphor that I have seen in a while, well met. I am going to be stealing this one for future use.
I suppose you expect we should all be as eager as you to give up all but the pretense of privacy because the bogeyman makes you piss your pants with fear?
um of course they would, that is why so much protection is built around the process.
That was one of the things that Manning talked about with the snitch Adrian Lamo; that the process was designed to blind wikileaks themselves from direct knowledge of the leaker's identity; because it would be a liability to everyone involved.
By not knowing, they have to take other measures to carefully validate leaked information since they can't rely on the credentials of a source. Its obviously a series of trade offs.
However, its really the only viable way to operate, since they know they can never ensure total security, the best thing they can do to protect their sources is to actually not know themselves.
Its very true, however, it is avoidable if you are willing to make trade offs.
For example, some of the server distros like RHEL don't often have that issue. The thing is, they don't update often except for security. Most desktop users will not be happy running something based off Fedora core 12 today; but on the server end, lots of people are still deploying on it just for that reason.
For me, I tend to have little problem with either Ubuntu or Debian....until I find I want newer stuff and start running testing or unstable distributions which....do break a lot more often than stable.
Your right, thats all blunt objects, and its the FBIs statistics I was looking at:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cj...
So "blunt objects" and "personal weapons" (including fists, etc), EACH are more than double that of rifles at 380.
But this is homicides, doesn't count intentional self wounding, since, that isn't really a useful statistic, being...intentional and consensual.
OTOH aside from existing regulations aimed at the business side, I don't see what is wrong from that persons perspective. In principle I have no issue with a service that allows people to, on a part time basis, give other people rides for a few bucks to make some spare income.
Why does everything need to be professional? I think the problem with amateurs providing services are mostly overblown.
Believe it or not, and I know not everyone complies with this, but I believe external markers are required (here in MA) on ANY vehicle with commercial plates. Note, of course, that no Uber driver is going to have commercial plates, and really shouldn't, generally people don't need commercial plates when they supply their own personal vehicle for the job. (imagine what that would do to pizza delivery)
Here is a nickle, kid, go tell someone who never had to go find another system to run a web browser on because the latest updated broke his XF86Config. (a version of which happened again recently when I wasn't paying attention and I allowed an update to uninstall the ati graphics driver packages....oops, always read those "to be removed" lists)
Every distro out there has managed some type of update breakage at some point, and if you run a full desktop you pretty much can't avoid it.
Though I did switch back to Debian myself because I didn't like the direction they were going with the Desktop and noticed Debian release cycles had shortened significantly since I switched.
My father had a hunting story about a gun like that, tho it was a single shot....
"....again I slowly put a round in the chamber and slowly lifted the gun back up, and for the third time raised the barrel even higher, this time I was just about aiming into the sky, I pulled the trigger.....and finally....grazed the deers belly and he ran off....if that was my gun, I would have wrapped it around a tree"
This, and so much this for just about every gun related cry for regulation.
I keep seeing people talk about high capacity magazines, assault rifles etc etc every time gun violence comes up. Oh we need to ban this, we need to background check that.... never mind that they are whipping themselves up into a froth about the least common categories of gun violence.
In the end, real crime, even the real heinous shit, tends to be done with either hand guns or hand held melee weapons. Almost nobody uses rifles for crimes, more hammers are used to kill than rifles....all rifles, assault or otherwise....but nearly every gun control nutter I talk seems to think every gun owners secret dream is to carry around an AK-47 all day.
In fact, so far the only real connection between gun laws and crime is, places with crime problems tend to make more gun laws as a result.... which doesn't do shit about their crime problems. The whole issue is only popular because its an easy sound bite "solution", you know, the kind that "always work" like banning drugs.
Hardcore is without mods? Lol! Depends on your mods man.
I was playing since before science mode existed so, by the time career came out, I found I could just monkey stomp the tech tree. I tend to run mods which add new game mechanics that add challenge. For example, Tac Life Support which means kerbals need supply of water, food, and oxygen and electricity.... that is one of the few things that kept me from early moon missions (solar panels are not available right away).
Construction time to add ship build time mechanics, Deadly Reentry for heating effects (might be obsolete now, at least partially), FAR for better aero (I hear its getting even better), RemoteTek to simulate antena range and signal delay, scansat for mapping/scanning features, cacteye for telescopes, realchute for better parachutes, stage recovery, KIDS to make thrust/throttle/ISP/altitude relationships to work more correctly (default KSP makes fuel consumption vary with atmospheric pressure instead of thrust, so throttle input relates to thrust not fuel usage, KIDS has options to fix that) ....then once it is hardcore and good top it all off with Astronomer's visual pack to get clouds, auroras, dust storms, etc to make it real pretty.
Its not missing, its intentionally ignored for the sake of gameplay. Getting normal gamers up to speed on stable orbits with 2 body physics induces enough rage quits. The ability to easily have stable orbits is a bit more important than the neat tricks you can do with a better gravitational model.
I would love to be able to pull off tricky low energy tranfers and use multi-body gravitation to send ships on slow tours of the solar system for very little fuel costs, or put a satelite in a halo orbit.... fun stuff but.... nothing that I would want to trade stable orbits for.... the simplified physics makes it easier to get to a point where you understand it.
I really think paid mods are dumb, they will do little good other than encourage new modders, but, it will do it by giving them false hopes and setting them up for an antagonistic atmosphere. Look at Kerbal modders now for an example. They work together. There are few "competing" mods, most work with eachother, and when you see two modders working on similar or related mods meet in the forums it is always a "Oh you are the guy who does X? Awesome how did you do Y?" and they have a great conversation and work together a bit.
Enter paid mods, and they would have incentive to...not do that. You would have modders who just copy others and release trying to make a buck, you would have people trying to obscure code, and hide their "secret sauce".... all.... for a pittance that will never sustain them.
I run 30 kerbal mods now (and a similar number of skyrim ones). If mods started going paid, theres maybe 2 or 3 on each I would even consider continuing to use if they were even a $1 or 2....in fact, it would massively increase my resistance to even wanting to try a mod.
So the main thing it will do is mean a lot less mods get used.
Whats the difference? I let steam update it, and then copy it off to another directory for mod installs so I can keep a pristine copy around. Sometimes I make two copies so I can run different mod sets.
I see no issue here, plus I have steam already so why go anywhere else if I already use it? Don't really need an installer.