Why Mars? There is a nice big rock orbiting the Earth that we could establish a base on, and it would be much cheaper to get to it. Granted, there is not a lot there, but so what? There is not a lot on Mars either, and any technology we used to establish a lunar base would be equally applicable to the establishment of a Martian base.
Imagine the technology that would be needed to build a self-sufficient lunar colony. You would need to be carbon-neutral, recycle all your water, and pollution would generally be out of the question. Any dangerous byproducts created by the colony would have to be dealt with on-site.
Sounds like technologies that would be important here on Earth also, and setting up a lunar base would create a need for such technology. The moon also has the advantage of allowing an emergency return to Earth, which makes it a good first step for living in space.
Of course, the expenses are pretty high, and the technologies that would be developed would not be useful on Earth for a long time after the initial investment. Without any real profitable reason to live on the moon, it would be hard to justify spending that much money. Now, if we discovered some useful resource that could be profitably mined, that would be another story.
Except that like deniable encryption, steganography may simply be outlawed and the existence of steganography software on your computer could become a crime in itself. As with deniable encryption, when the police see that you have steganography software on your computer, they may simply question / torture you until you tell them where the data is hidden. Steganography is somewhat better than deniable encryption because the cover traffic can be designed to not arouse any suspicions, but if you are already at the point of being questioned by the police it does not help much.
well we [the industry] will be just happy selling encryption with the tagline: so secure - no one can break it - except your average McForensic dude with a software package you can torrent. See, secure!
More like the software industry wants to remain friendly with the Department of Justice, and will gladly push a DoJ-approved cryptosystem on their customers unless their customers start jumping ship. Remember the clipper chip and how a certain large telecom was prepared to play along?
As I understand the case law (IANAL), the following has been held by the courts:
A defendant who consented to a search of his computer can be compelled to give up his password later even if he does not consent to another search. This is In re Boucher, and it is worth noting that in this situation a deniable encryption system like Truecrypt would not have helped at all.
In cases where a defendant's knowledge of a passphrase can be used as evidence that the defendant was in control of a computer that was used to commit crimes, the 5th amendment does apply.
In cases where a defendant did not consent to any searches, the defendant cannot be forced to disclose a secret key. This is considered to be equivalent to compelling a defendant to produce incriminating documents, which the Supreme Court found was a violation of 5th amendment rights.
In practice, the headaches that would ensue from widespread use of deniable encryption would cause one of two outcomes:
Police would stop asking for secret keys, or only ask for a short period of time, because they would have no way of knowing whether or not they have the true secret.
The system would be outlawed.
Countries that respect and protect a right to free speech would not outlaw such a system, but unfortunately such countries are few and far between. Deniable encryption encryption works in theory, but in practice the existence of non-deniable encryption makes it hard for people to claim that they are innocent users of a deniable encryption system. While there are innocent uses of such a system (perhaps your business secrets are so valuable that being tortured for them is not beyond the realm of possibility) they are few and far between; deniable encryption is tool for protecting your data from a government, and for all their talk about China and Iran, most western governments are not interested in having citizens who can secure their communications and data from police investigations.
That is not how the police in America work. When they cannot crack a cryptosystem, they try to get it outlawed or prevent it from becoming mainstream, and then push for a system with a backdoor. When they manage to crack a system e.g. the Hushmail attack, they parade it around and declare that no matter what anyone does the police will be able to defeat it.
If this sounds like Doublethink to you, perhaps you should take a look around and reconsider your views on whether it was Orwell or Huxley who was correct.
As far as I know, the watermark is placed in different frames for different theaters, which would make averaging attacks difficult. The watermarks are pretty resilient to noise -- they can be detected even when a cheap video camera is pointed at the screen in a movie theater -- and the amount of noise that would have to be added in order to kill the watermark would result in an unacceptable quality even for people who sell illegal DVDs on the streets. This is not your run-of-the-mill "put data in the low order bits" sort of watermark; while I do not doubt that it could be defeated by researchers, it is fairly well designed.
I was thinking that a way of sending hidden messages between two locations (assuming a reasonably reliable network), one could introduce send messages by controlling the rate of the replies in a predictable manner (using ECC and varying transition timings for error rate compensation).
This is a well known covert channel that has been covered in many security engineering books. One of the design principles for military computer networks is to keep the bandwidth of such a channel below 1 bit per second, although for very sensitive data it may need to be even lower.
There are plenty of ways that "subversive" groups can hide their networks from the authorities right now. Anyone can post encrypted messages to alt.anonymous.messages to hide the recipient, and anyone can use the remailers network to hide the sender. If you are curious about criminals doing this sort of thing, look up the "Yardbird" pedophile group, some of whom have continued to evade capture.
It is also worth mentioning that steganography is neither new nor undeveloped. Plenty of steganography tools exist right now and can be used by anyone. Anyone who runs an publicly accessible wiki has probably seen steganography on their wiki, in the form of inexplicable spam messages (my local LUG saw this). The movie industry routinely uses steganography in the form of watermarks that are embedded in movies, which identify the theater the movie was shown at.
Steganography is already widely used by the movie industry. Movies sent to movie theaters have robust watermarks hidden in them, which helps the MPAA identify the theaters where unauthorized recordings of movies are being made. Steganography is also used in laser printers, to help the FBI identify the origin of printed documents.
Like cryptography, steganography is not just limited to keeping your information private or to fighting censorship.
You cannot vote for a third party without weakening your side's position.
The Democrats and the Republicans are largely on the same side for many issues. Which of the two major parties is opposed to the militarization of the police? Which of the two major parties is opposed to the curtailment of our rights? Which of the two major parties is not on the payroll of powerful corporations?
Fragmenting the liberal vote while the conservative vote is unified has cost the liberal side the electoral victory in the very recent past.
What liberal side? The Democrats are on the left compared to the Republicans, but both parties are on the right wing of politics. The parties may occasionally disagree on which corporations will receive handouts and police/military support from the government, but they both agree that corporations should receive such support. The parties may occasionally disagree on which particular forms of speech should be censored, but they agree that censorship should happen. Conservatives conquered American politics a long time ago.
Your only choice is between whichever is the (slightly) lesser of two evils.
...and so the cycle continues. This sort of mentality makes people complicit in the current system.
Frankly, if liberals and conservatives were to start voting for the parties that represented their political views rather than the current set, we would probably see the rise of a new two party system. It is hard to say if we even have a two party system right now, given how both parties seem to support the same goals with only very minor differences between them. Ralph Nader took a lot of heat for saying there was not a dime for the difference between the parties, but he was right.
I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party.
Enforcement by whom? This is just a standard by W3C, and it is a weak one at that. If you fail to produce compliant HTML, your web page might not render correctly; if you fail to follow this standard, nobody will notice.
Privacy is not something that a standard can guarantee you.
If I create a simple, one page site the terms of service of which simply say "you are not permitted to use this web site unless you are Rinisari", I could turn them over to the authorities because they've committed a crime?
Why go to the trouble of creating a website? Since there are so many laws on the books and nobody really knows when or if they are breaking one, you could probably turn anyone over to the authorities.
Stop voting for Republicrats. Neither party gives a damn about your rights, they are both working hard to establish tyranny and have been largely successful over the past few decades.
And that the connections persist even in the yard or -gasp- out on the street as they drive away or up to their house. And it doesn't take much of a cognitive leap to realize that if they can see their network, that others quite possibly could too.
Actually, it takes a substantial cognitive leap for many people. Many people do not understand that a computer can record things, that these things can be automated, that cars passing by their house can detect wifi, etc.
Why do you think people name their networks funny and clever things? Would they take the time to think up names like "AMANDA_HAS_AIDS" or "get off my netz" if they didn't expect others to see them?
Why do you think people "name" their networks "linksys?"
Robots.txt is hidden from view -- users never have to see it. Adding a suffix to a hotspot name is not hidden from view, everyone has to see it, and it becomes an annoyance.
Websites are not related to home addresses. We are talking about physical locations, not some server on the Internet, and in most cases those locations are a person's home.
Neither of these is a particularly convincing argument for technical people, of course. I do not care about my ESSID and I know that radio transmissions are not in any way private. The average, uneducated citizen is different -- they expect wifi to be private to their home, not collected into a massive database somewhere. The FCC designed the 802.11b/g/n standard with this in mind; that is why it is unlicensed and at such low power levels (compare with licensed radio operations, where everything has to be explicitly registered and authorized).
Really, I am on the fence on this issue. One side of me says that this should be opt-in, and the other says that people should know better. In either case, the problem boils down to technical ignorance.
Note that protesting isn't the same as shooting at the government
Protesters are people who still have faith that the democracy is working and that they have some say in their government. Protests are what we have instead of armed revolts (otherwise known as terrorism), because people still believe that we live in a democracy. Now, if the OWS people really believed that the government was controlled by corporations and not by their voting power, then we would see an armed rebellion.
add to this that the street traffic is going to be lower at that time
I am going to guess that this was the primary concern. Traffic is pretty bad in lower Manhattan, and this operation could easily create a gridlock condition. The last thing the NYPD needs is more negative PR.
Slashdot Mirror
Why Mars? There is a nice big rock orbiting the Earth that we could establish a base on, and it would be much cheaper to get to it. Granted, there is not a lot there, but so what? There is not a lot on Mars either, and any technology we used to establish a lunar base would be equally applicable to the establishment of a Martian base.
Imagine the technology that would be needed to build a self-sufficient lunar colony. You would need to be carbon-neutral, recycle all your water, and pollution would generally be out of the question. Any dangerous byproducts created by the colony would have to be dealt with on-site.
Sounds like technologies that would be important here on Earth also, and setting up a lunar base would create a need for such technology. The moon also has the advantage of allowing an emergency return to Earth, which makes it a good first step for living in space.
Of course, the expenses are pretty high, and the technologies that would be developed would not be useful on Earth for a long time after the initial investment. Without any real profitable reason to live on the moon, it would be hard to justify spending that much money. Now, if we discovered some useful resource that could be profitably mined, that would be another story.
I take it that your operating system of choice cannot be installed from a thumb drive?
Except that like deniable encryption, steganography may simply be outlawed and the existence of steganography software on your computer could become a crime in itself. As with deniable encryption, when the police see that you have steganography software on your computer, they may simply question / torture you until you tell them where the data is hidden. Steganography is somewhat better than deniable encryption because the cover traffic can be designed to not arouse any suspicions, but if you are already at the point of being questioned by the police it does not help much.
This means that people will not be prosecuted or punished for downloading their music at no cost, right?
well we [the industry] will be just happy selling encryption with the tagline: so secure - no one can break it - except your average McForensic dude with a software package you can torrent. See, secure!
More like the software industry wants to remain friendly with the Department of Justice, and will gladly push a DoJ-approved cryptosystem on their customers unless their customers start jumping ship. Remember the clipper chip and how a certain large telecom was prepared to play along?
Perhaps a real lawyer should chime in here.
Countries that respect and protect a right to free speech would not outlaw such a system, but unfortunately such countries are few and far between. Deniable encryption encryption works in theory, but in practice the existence of non-deniable encryption makes it hard for people to claim that they are innocent users of a deniable encryption system. While there are innocent uses of such a system (perhaps your business secrets are so valuable that being tortured for them is not beyond the realm of possibility) they are few and far between; deniable encryption is tool for protecting your data from a government, and for all their talk about China and Iran, most western governments are not interested in having citizens who can secure their communications and data from police investigations.
That is not how the police in America work. When they cannot crack a cryptosystem, they try to get it outlawed or prevent it from becoming mainstream, and then push for a system with a backdoor. When they manage to crack a system e.g. the Hushmail attack, they parade it around and declare that no matter what anyone does the police will be able to defeat it.
If this sounds like Doublethink to you, perhaps you should take a look around and reconsider your views on whether it was Orwell or Huxley who was correct.
As far as I know, the watermark is placed in different frames for different theaters, which would make averaging attacks difficult. The watermarks are pretty resilient to noise -- they can be detected even when a cheap video camera is pointed at the screen in a movie theater -- and the amount of noise that would have to be added in order to kill the watermark would result in an unacceptable quality even for people who sell illegal DVDs on the streets. This is not your run-of-the-mill "put data in the low order bits" sort of watermark; while I do not doubt that it could be defeated by researchers, it is fairly well designed.
I was thinking that a way of sending hidden messages between two locations (assuming a reasonably reliable network), one could introduce send messages by controlling the rate of the replies in a predictable manner (using ECC and varying transition timings for error rate compensation).
This is a well known covert channel that has been covered in many security engineering books. One of the design principles for military computer networks is to keep the bandwidth of such a channel below 1 bit per second, although for very sensitive data it may need to be even lower.
There are plenty of ways that "subversive" groups can hide their networks from the authorities right now. Anyone can post encrypted messages to alt.anonymous.messages to hide the recipient, and anyone can use the remailers network to hide the sender. If you are curious about criminals doing this sort of thing, look up the "Yardbird" pedophile group, some of whom have continued to evade capture.
It is also worth mentioning that steganography is neither new nor undeveloped. Plenty of steganography tools exist right now and can be used by anyone. Anyone who runs an publicly accessible wiki has probably seen steganography on their wiki, in the form of inexplicable spam messages (my local LUG saw this). The movie industry routinely uses steganography in the form of watermarks that are embedded in movies, which identify the theater the movie was shown at.
Steganography is already widely used by the movie industry. Movies sent to movie theaters have robust watermarks hidden in them, which helps the MPAA identify the theaters where unauthorized recordings of movies are being made. Steganography is also used in laser printers, to help the FBI identify the origin of printed documents.
Like cryptography, steganography is not just limited to keeping your information private or to fighting censorship.
You cannot vote for a third party without weakening your side's position.
The Democrats and the Republicans are largely on the same side for many issues. Which of the two major parties is opposed to the militarization of the police? Which of the two major parties is opposed to the curtailment of our rights? Which of the two major parties is not on the payroll of powerful corporations?
Fragmenting the liberal vote while the conservative vote is unified has cost the liberal side the electoral victory in the very recent past.
What liberal side? The Democrats are on the left compared to the Republicans, but both parties are on the right wing of politics. The parties may occasionally disagree on which corporations will receive handouts and police/military support from the government, but they both agree that corporations should receive such support. The parties may occasionally disagree on which particular forms of speech should be censored, but they agree that censorship should happen. Conservatives conquered American politics a long time ago.
Your only choice is between whichever is the (slightly) lesser of two evils.
Frankly, if liberals and conservatives were to start voting for the parties that represented their political views rather than the current set, we would probably see the rise of a new two party system. It is hard to say if we even have a two party system right now, given how both parties seem to support the same goals with only very minor differences between them. Ralph Nader took a lot of heat for saying there was not a dime for the difference between the parties, but he was right.
I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party.
And then the enforcement is lax.
Enforcement by whom? This is just a standard by W3C, and it is a weak one at that. If you fail to produce compliant HTML, your web page might not render correctly; if you fail to follow this standard, nobody will notice.
Privacy is not something that a standard can guarantee you.
If I create a simple, one page site the terms of service of which simply say "you are not permitted to use this web site unless you are Rinisari", I could turn them over to the authorities because they've committed a crime?
Why go to the trouble of creating a website? Since there are so many laws on the books and nobody really knows when or if they are breaking one, you could probably turn anyone over to the authorities.
Stop voting for Republicrats. Neither party gives a damn about your rights, they are both working hard to establish tyranny and have been largely successful over the past few decades.
when did the government become so extremely pro-corporation
The 19th century called and wants its shock and outrage back.
This spells potentially problems for a lot of people because most people do not read the TOS or EULA documents.
Hm...
"This spells potentially [sic] problems for a lot of people because most people do not read the laws that their government has passed"
Are you sure that you are not guilty of a felony?
And that the connections persist even in the yard or -gasp- out on the street as they drive away or up to their house. And it doesn't take much of a cognitive leap to realize that if they can see their network, that others quite possibly could too.
Actually, it takes a substantial cognitive leap for many people. Many people do not understand that a computer can record things, that these things can be automated, that cars passing by their house can detect wifi, etc.
Why do you think people name their networks funny and clever things? Would they take the time to think up names like "AMANDA_HAS_AIDS" or "get off my netz" if they didn't expect others to see them?
Why do you think people "name" their networks "linksys?"
Neither of these is a particularly convincing argument for technical people, of course. I do not care about my ESSID and I know that radio transmissions are not in any way private. The average, uneducated citizen is different -- they expect wifi to be private to their home, not collected into a massive database somewhere. The FCC designed the 802.11b/g/n standard with this in mind; that is why it is unlicensed and at such low power levels (compare with licensed radio operations, where everything has to be explicitly registered and authorized).
Really, I am on the fence on this issue. One side of me says that this should be opt-in, and the other says that people should know better. In either case, the problem boils down to technical ignorance.
Note that protesting isn't the same as shooting at the government
Protesters are people who still have faith that the democracy is working and that they have some say in their government. Protests are what we have instead of armed revolts (otherwise known as terrorism), because people still believe that we live in a democracy. Now, if the OWS people really believed that the government was controlled by corporations and not by their voting power, then we would see an armed rebellion.
add to this that the street traffic is going to be lower at that time
I am going to guess that this was the primary concern. Traffic is pretty bad in lower Manhattan, and this operation could easily create a gridlock condition. The last thing the NYPD needs is more negative PR.