I guess since you are so anti-copyright even people who didn't pay would be allowed to have a copy.
Yeah, and so what? The age of copyrights is over, it is time to grow up and move on with your life.
What incentive is there for anyone to pay anything under those circumstances?
If nobody pays, the book does not get published; people who want the book will pay for it.
Furthermore, anyone who wants to try such a system is perfectly free to do it today. The fact that by far most authors don't choose such a method says volumes about what they think of such an idea.
Or that there is still a substantial market for dead tree books, and that the penetration of tablets has not yet reached a level that would make such a system attractive. We also have a system of ever-more-draconian copyright laws that are propping up old publishing models and businesses, which removes any incentive to develop a new system. I really do not think that the lack of a new system is evidence that there could be no workable alternative to what we have today.
How about authors refuse to publish their books until they have raised enough money? A well known author could publish a suspenseful preview or a first chapter, and then request $5 from each reader until some amount is raised, at which point the book will be published. There is no need for a publishing industry to even exist under such a system, the authors could just use the Internet and encourage, rather than attack, the copying of their books.
Is there some reason to think that such a thing would not work? We could build a payment system into tablet computers to ease such a process, along with a system of sharing books to help authors build a reputation.
we are stuck with something that is not the best, but is workable.
Value is created by scarcity, and there is simply no natural scarcity of books in this century. We are trying to build walls into our technology so that we can pretend that we still live in a previous century, which is just absurd. We no longer buy stamps to do things like pay our bills or send personal letters, so why are we so worried about whether or not the book publishing system remains relevant?
Sorry, but if people want to make a living writing books, they will need to find a new way to monetize that. We cannot allow the Internet to become a maze of walls and restrictions, we cannot have our computers monitor what we do, all for the sake of keeping an old business model alive. Sorry if you are an author who is not creative enough to monetize your work in this century without tricking everyone into ceding control of their computers to you.
At one time we had people whose job was to tell stories around the campfire; then we discovered that stories could be written down, and storytellers who failed to adapt had to find new lines of work. Now selling books is an obsolete business model, because we have computer networks that can make nearly unlimited copies of any written work at high speed; writers who fail to adapt will have to find new lines of work.
the real world marketplace works differently than the artificially supported one that runs acadamia
Ironically, music, movie, software, and book distribution are all artificially supported markets, propped up by increasingly draconian copyright laws, and academia is becoming more and more profit-oriented.
Only by people who have never looked up the definitions of "stealing" and "copying."
And congratulations, you are fucking over libraries and everyone else (future versions will have ever more draconian DRM or simply not be available in libraries) for your own greed.
DRM is always doomed to fail. It attempts to solve an unsolvable security engineering problem (the secure device in an insecure environment) and the security only needs to be broken once for the whole system to fall apart. For some reason, copyright-based industries have failed to grasp this fundamental truth, and their lobbyists have convinced governments to prop up their bad security systems with undemocratic laws and censorship. They have even convinced the public school system to spread their greed-driven propaganda to young children.
Reuters had a right to know what happened to their journalists; the fact that they were killed in war is not relevant. They asked politely, and the US army refused to give them the video. This is not a matter of defending the army's actions, or comparing their actions to more barbaric wars, it is a matter of whether or not people have a right to know how two journalists wound up dead.
As for the DEA, it is not just that the US government has signals intelligence capabilities -- which it has had since World War I, by the way. It is that until recently, intelligence agencies either operated within US borders (e.g. the FBI) or beyond US borders (CIA, NSA, etc.). Now we have the DEA, which can operate inside or outside of the United States, which has more sophisticated signals intelligence capabilities than the FBI, and which has been pressured by "cooperative" governments to assist in the surveillance of political opponents. This is made worse by the fact that the DEA is not charged with protecting our national security in any way, shape, or form; the DEA is supposed to enforce drug laws.
At the end of the day, people in a democracy have a right and a need to know what their government is doing. This is not about what the US government does or can do, it is about what the citizens of the US are permitted to know.
How about the video of the airstrike that killed two journalists in Iraq? Or the information on how the DEA has vast signals intelligence capabilities that it can use in both foreign and domestic operations (which other member of the law enforcement/intelligence community can do that?)? Or the information on the US army executing civilians in Iraq?
At the very least, the citizens of the United States should be aware of what their government is doing. How can we decide who to vote for if we do not even know what our government is up to?
If found guilty, putting him up against the wall and doing what you do to traitors up against the wall is fully appropriate for the damage he has done.
How about the fact that the DEA -- supposedly a law enforcement agency -- has amassed such vast signals intelligence power that dictators are demanding DEA assistance in spying on political opponents? We knew that the war on drugs was out of control before the leak, but this gives a clear indication of just how out of control things are, and shows us why the government considers the DEA to be a member of the intelligence community. It is also a warning sign, because unlike the CIA, FBI, or NSA, the DEA is allowed to engage in both foreign and domestic operations, including intelligence gathering.
That sounds an awful lot like the argument used by the government during the pentagon papers trial (New York Times Co. vs. United States). How about showing us the innocent civilians, human rights activists, informants, etc. who have been killed as a result of the leaks?
Meanwhile, Reuters has the video that shows its journalists being killed by a US helicopter strike. The people of the United States have been given a glance at their government's activities, which includes information on the enormous intelligence power that the DEA has amassed. In the middle east, the documents were a catalyst for revolutions that ousted tyrants from power.
Manning broke the law, and it is hard to feel sympathy for someone who knew the danger and chose to leak the documents and videos anyway. However, the leak has been a boon for democracy and a reminder that the US government keeps far too much information secret.
When law enforcement arrives, you get rid of the USB key and the drive is undecryptable.
This gets you charged with obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, etc. The penalties for these crimes may be less severe than the crimes you are trying to cover up, in which case it is acceptable, but the point of deniable encryption is that you can assert your innocence by producing the innocent key.
In the United States many police services, especially in large cities, meet the definition of a paramilitary force. The last thing we need to have is more police power.
To put it another way, the more effective the police are at enforcing the law, the more laws wind up being passed. We have so many laws on the books right now that it is hard for anyone to know whether or not they are actually guilty of some violation. Every new tool the police obtain is a tool that will be used to enforce more oppressive laws and ruin more innocent lives. Unless the deployment of these scanners is coupled with a wave of repeals and legal reforms, these scanners will wind up being another step down the road to tyranny.
Yes, the police serve the public, and that means that if the public feels that some aspect of police work is unacceptable then the police must not do it -- even if it is helpful in catching criminals. These days we have militarized police forces and vast, ever-expanding police power and so it is easy to forget that the police are there to serve the public. It is cruelly ironic that one of the most famous police forces in the country has the motto, "To protect and to serve."
Except for any criminals who are using these plate scanners. Do you think the people responsible for finding cars using this system is above being bribed? What system of accountability is in place to prevent abuses? How would people even know if they were being illegally tracked by this system?
The problem is not that the system might be used to catch criminals, it is that it almost certainly will be used to track innocent people, to avoid constitutional restrictions, and to make possible the enforcement of an even larger set of laws (as if we do not have an absurdly large and complex legal system as is).
The point of open source would be to compile this encryption software into dozens or hundreds of other applications widely used.
That worked for public key encryption because there was a strong business need for it, which was justifiable within just about any sensible legal framework. There really are criminals who would sniff packets and commit credit card fraud with the information they gathered if those connections were not encrypted. The risk is real for large numbers of people and businesses, and so SSL/TLS is built into commonly used PC software and the push against public key cryptography was a failure. Authoritarian governments recognized the economic importance of public key encryption and they allow it, but people can be required to surrender private keys on demand.
When it comes to deniable encryption, it is much harder to argue that there is an economic need for it. Most people and "legitimate" businesses are not at risk of being tortured by criminals for their secret keys, and that includes businesses with highly valuable secrets. Even in cases where there is a real risk of being tortured for a secret key, the utility of deniable encryption is questionable -- do you think a Mexican drug cartel is going to stop torturing a suspected informant just because they were given an innocent key?
The principle use of deniable encryption is to fight back against key disclosure laws -- to fight the government. Why would Microsoft or Apple want to ship products that help people fight back against their governments? Even in the United States (where there are no key disclosure laws) Microsoft and Apple have no reason to provoke the government by shipping strong steganography or deniable encryption products.
Further if it were illegal the code itself may night be on the computer but on a FOB, like a USB key.
That is not going to be feasible for the majority of people. You are talking about hiding the software outside of your home (do you think the police do not know how to find a thumb drive you hid in a vent?), secretly retrieving it when you need to send a secret message, and then hiding the drive again. That might be something a secret agent is willing to do, but that is far beyond the bounds of what can be reasonably expected of journalists or human rights activists, let alone common citizens.
Given that there are several open source implementations I'm not sure how effective outlawing them would be
Keep in mind that the point of deniable encryption is to allow you to prove your innocence -- so if using deniable encryption is a crime in itself, the entire point is defeated. It does not matter where the key is hidden, it does not matter how theoretically strong the deniability is.
Really? Encryption is mainstream? I have not observed that, in fact, people give me weird looks when I say that I use whole disk encryption, when I ask them to enable OTR, and when I suggest that maintaining a PGP key is worth their time.
Steganography software does not need to be on your computer, it can be on a web service
...which fails for disc encryption for obvious reasons.
That aside, if the web service is illegal, you have the same problem as before: you need to somehow connect to an illegal website without getting caught by the police. Tor does a reasonable job at this, but a country that makes steganography illegal would certainly make Tor illegal as well. Tor does a good job of disguising itself as a typical TLS connection, but it is nowhere near good enough -- on several occasions nations have been able to block all Tor traffic by distinguishing that traffic from a standard TLS connection. The existence of Tor on your computer may also be incriminating in some places.
Now hidden drives can be found by scanning the hard drive, but steganography can't.
Actually, a strong deniable encryption system will not reveal whether or not the ciphertext can be decrypted to additional messages. The problem is not that the police can scan a drive and detect a hidden partition, it is that they can simply see that your bootloader supports a deniable WDE system. Steganography does not help here either: the police will turn on your computer and see that you have a bootloader that supports steganography.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think the general public is going to shell out money for an as-yet-unwritten book?
Did I say unwritten? No, I did not. People have been known to shell out money for unpublished books:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
I guess since you are so anti-copyright even people who didn't pay would be allowed to have a copy.
Yeah, and so what? The age of copyrights is over, it is time to grow up and move on with your life.
What incentive is there for anyone to pay anything under those circumstances?
If nobody pays, the book does not get published; people who want the book will pay for it.
Furthermore, anyone who wants to try such a system is perfectly free to do it today. The fact that by far most authors don't choose such a method says volumes about what they think of such an idea.
Or that there is still a substantial market for dead tree books, and that the penetration of tablets has not yet reached a level that would make such a system attractive. We also have a system of ever-more-draconian copyright laws that are propping up old publishing models and businesses, which removes any incentive to develop a new system. I really do not think that the lack of a new system is evidence that there could be no workable alternative to what we have today.
Is there some reason to think that such a thing would not work? We could build a payment system into tablet computers to ease such a process, along with a system of sharing books to help authors build a reputation.
we are stuck with something that is not the best, but is workable.
Sorry, but this is not a workable solution:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
What horrible, authoritarian country do you live in where encrypting a phone call is illegal? In my country, we have this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A5/1
Value is created by scarcity, and there is simply no natural scarcity of books in this century. We are trying to build walls into our technology so that we can pretend that we still live in a previous century, which is just absurd. We no longer buy stamps to do things like pay our bills or send personal letters, so why are we so worried about whether or not the book publishing system remains relevant?
Sorry, but if people want to make a living writing books, they will need to find a new way to monetize that. We cannot allow the Internet to become a maze of walls and restrictions, we cannot have our computers monitor what we do, all for the sake of keeping an old business model alive. Sorry if you are an author who is not creative enough to monetize your work in this century without tricking everyone into ceding control of their computers to you.
At one time we had people whose job was to tell stories around the campfire; then we discovered that stories could be written down, and storytellers who failed to adapt had to find new lines of work. Now selling books is an obsolete business model, because we have computer networks that can make nearly unlimited copies of any written work at high speed; writers who fail to adapt will have to find new lines of work.
the real world marketplace works differently than the artificially supported one that runs acadamia
Ironically, music, movie, software, and book distribution are all artificially supported markets, propped up by increasingly draconian copyright laws, and academia is becoming more and more profit-oriented.
That is also known as stealing
Only by people who have never looked up the definitions of "stealing" and "copying."
And congratulations, you are fucking over libraries and everyone else (future versions will have ever more draconian DRM or simply not be available in libraries) for your own greed.
DRM is always doomed to fail. It attempts to solve an unsolvable security engineering problem (the secure device in an insecure environment) and the security only needs to be broken once for the whole system to fall apart. For some reason, copyright-based industries have failed to grasp this fundamental truth, and their lobbyists have convinced governments to prop up their bad security systems with undemocratic laws and censorship. They have even convinced the public school system to spread their greed-driven propaganda to young children.
Yet you defend these people.
Reuters had a right to know what happened to their journalists; the fact that they were killed in war is not relevant. They asked politely, and the US army refused to give them the video. This is not a matter of defending the army's actions, or comparing their actions to more barbaric wars, it is a matter of whether or not people have a right to know how two journalists wound up dead.
As for the DEA, it is not just that the US government has signals intelligence capabilities -- which it has had since World War I, by the way. It is that until recently, intelligence agencies either operated within US borders (e.g. the FBI) or beyond US borders (CIA, NSA, etc.). Now we have the DEA, which can operate inside or outside of the United States, which has more sophisticated signals intelligence capabilities than the FBI, and which has been pressured by "cooperative" governments to assist in the surveillance of political opponents. This is made worse by the fact that the DEA is not charged with protecting our national security in any way, shape, or form; the DEA is supposed to enforce drug laws.
At the end of the day, people in a democracy have a right and a need to know what their government is doing. This is not about what the US government does or can do, it is about what the citizens of the US are permitted to know.
How about the video of the airstrike that killed two journalists in Iraq? Or the information on how the DEA has vast signals intelligence capabilities that it can use in both foreign and domestic operations (which other member of the law enforcement/intelligence community can do that?)? Or the information on the US army executing civilians in Iraq?
At the very least, the citizens of the United States should be aware of what their government is doing. How can we decide who to vote for if we do not even know what our government is up to?
If found guilty, putting him up against the wall and doing what you do to traitors up against the wall is fully appropriate for the damage he has done.
Citation needed.
Well too bad for Manning then he uncovered NOTHING
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/world/26wikidrugs.html?pagewanted=all
In the end it seemed like a big bowl of nothing
How about the fact that the DEA -- supposedly a law enforcement agency -- has amassed such vast signals intelligence power that dictators are demanding DEA assistance in spying on political opponents? We knew that the war on drugs was out of control before the leak, but this gives a clear indication of just how out of control things are, and shows us why the government considers the DEA to be a member of the intelligence community. It is also a warning sign, because unlike the CIA, FBI, or NSA, the DEA is allowed to engage in both foreign and domestic operations, including intelligence gathering.
some of which could get people killed.
That sounds an awful lot like the argument used by the government during the pentagon papers trial (New York Times Co. vs. United States). How about showing us the innocent civilians, human rights activists, informants, etc. who have been killed as a result of the leaks?
Meanwhile, Reuters has the video that shows its journalists being killed by a US helicopter strike. The people of the United States have been given a glance at their government's activities, which includes information on the enormous intelligence power that the DEA has amassed. In the middle east, the documents were a catalyst for revolutions that ousted tyrants from power.
Manning broke the law, and it is hard to feel sympathy for someone who knew the danger and chose to leak the documents and videos anyway. However, the leak has been a boon for democracy and a reminder that the US government keeps far too much information secret.
When law enforcement arrives, you get rid of the USB key and the drive is undecryptable.
This gets you charged with obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, etc. The penalties for these crimes may be less severe than the crimes you are trying to cover up, in which case it is acceptable, but the point of deniable encryption is that you can assert your innocence by producing the innocent key.
" All your basepair are belong to us " !
FTFY
Get a vanity plate with _NOTRACK on it!
Is there some reason to think that the public will have access to these records?
In the United States many police services, especially in large cities, meet the definition of a paramilitary force. The last thing we need to have is more police power.
To put it another way, the more effective the police are at enforcing the law, the more laws wind up being passed. We have so many laws on the books right now that it is hard for anyone to know whether or not they are actually guilty of some violation. Every new tool the police obtain is a tool that will be used to enforce more oppressive laws and ruin more innocent lives. Unless the deployment of these scanners is coupled with a wave of repeals and legal reforms, these scanners will wind up being another step down the road to tyranny.
You live in a crowed city, and you should follow the rules of the system or get out.
I know it is a foreign concept to most Americans, but...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
Yes because the public knows better the job of the police than the police itself
The Wikipedia articles just abound this morning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_servants
Yes, the police serve the public, and that means that if the public feels that some aspect of police work is unacceptable then the police must not do it -- even if it is helpful in catching criminals. These days we have militarized police forces and vast, ever-expanding police power and so it is easy to forget that the police are there to serve the public. It is cruelly ironic that one of the most famous police forces in the country has the motto, "To protect and to serve."
It's a hard world for criminals.
Except for any criminals who are using these plate scanners. Do you think the people responsible for finding cars using this system is above being bribed? What system of accountability is in place to prevent abuses? How would people even know if they were being illegally tracked by this system?
The problem is not that the system might be used to catch criminals, it is that it almost certainly will be used to track innocent people, to avoid constitutional restrictions, and to make possible the enforcement of an even larger set of laws (as if we do not have an absurdly large and complex legal system as is).
Are not going to run into trouble, since the patent system is out of control.
FTFY
The point of open source would be to compile this encryption software into dozens or hundreds of other applications widely used.
That worked for public key encryption because there was a strong business need for it, which was justifiable within just about any sensible legal framework. There really are criminals who would sniff packets and commit credit card fraud with the information they gathered if those connections were not encrypted. The risk is real for large numbers of people and businesses, and so SSL/TLS is built into commonly used PC software and the push against public key cryptography was a failure. Authoritarian governments recognized the economic importance of public key encryption and they allow it, but people can be required to surrender private keys on demand.
When it comes to deniable encryption, it is much harder to argue that there is an economic need for it. Most people and "legitimate" businesses are not at risk of being tortured by criminals for their secret keys, and that includes businesses with highly valuable secrets. Even in cases where there is a real risk of being tortured for a secret key, the utility of deniable encryption is questionable -- do you think a Mexican drug cartel is going to stop torturing a suspected informant just because they were given an innocent key?
The principle use of deniable encryption is to fight back against key disclosure laws -- to fight the government. Why would Microsoft or Apple want to ship products that help people fight back against their governments? Even in the United States (where there are no key disclosure laws) Microsoft and Apple have no reason to provoke the government by shipping strong steganography or deniable encryption products.
Further if it were illegal the code itself may night be on the computer but on a FOB, like a USB key.
That is not going to be feasible for the majority of people. You are talking about hiding the software outside of your home (do you think the police do not know how to find a thumb drive you hid in a vent?), secretly retrieving it when you need to send a secret message, and then hiding the drive again. That might be something a secret agent is willing to do, but that is far beyond the bounds of what can be reasonably expected of journalists or human rights activists, let alone common citizens.
There will be no evidence of using deniable encryption.
Other than the software on your computer?
Given that there are several open source implementations I'm not sure how effective outlawing them would be
Keep in mind that the point of deniable encryption is to allow you to prove your innocence -- so if using deniable encryption is a crime in itself, the entire point is defeated. It does not matter where the key is hidden, it does not matter how theoretically strong the deniability is.
Really? Encryption is mainstream? I have not observed that, in fact, people give me weird looks when I say that I use whole disk encryption, when I ask them to enable OTR, and when I suggest that maintaining a PGP key is worth their time.
Steganography software does not need to be on your computer, it can be on a web service
That aside, if the web service is illegal, you have the same problem as before: you need to somehow connect to an illegal website without getting caught by the police. Tor does a reasonable job at this, but a country that makes steganography illegal would certainly make Tor illegal as well. Tor does a good job of disguising itself as a typical TLS connection, but it is nowhere near good enough -- on several occasions nations have been able to block all Tor traffic by distinguishing that traffic from a standard TLS connection. The existence of Tor on your computer may also be incriminating in some places.
Now hidden drives can be found by scanning the hard drive, but steganography can't.
Actually, a strong deniable encryption system will not reveal whether or not the ciphertext can be decrypted to additional messages. The problem is not that the police can scan a drive and detect a hidden partition, it is that they can simply see that your bootloader supports a deniable WDE system. Steganography does not help here either: the police will turn on your computer and see that you have a bootloader that supports steganography.