Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: Honestly....

the separate file/folder encryption of Windows

Yeah, "EFS", for "encrypted file system". Quite a bit older than BitLocker, and has some nice features, such as supporting multiple keys (so you can give access to multiple people, on a file/directory basis). Also will escrow keys to AD in a domain. But it's more work to use than BitLocker, and probably slower, though I haven't benchmarked it.

Still there, at least in Windows 10. See the cipher.exe command.

To be frank, I personally don't bother securing my printed-out recover keys, or my recovery USB drives, very carefully. What's the threat model in which someone tries to get my recovery keys from some physical object in my possession? I give that a very low probability. I expect that even if my computer bag were stolen with both my laptop and, say, a printed-out recovery key in it, the thief would ditch the bag and the recovery key before discovering the drive was encrypted.

But, of course, taking additional precautions with the recovery key has relatively low cost, so if you think it's worth doing so, go right ahead.

Re: Honestly....

Back when I was teaching at university, I managed a number of times to trip over my Thinkpad's power cord while pacing about the room, dragging it off the desk and onto the terrazzo floor. Never bothered it at all.

Re: Honestly....

This morning the laptop failed the first attempt at booting with a bitlocker related error.

The very first day that you start using a Windows machine with Bitlocker enabled, you should 1) back the key up to a USB drive, and 2) print out the recovery key on an actual piece of paper.

And should you ever disable Bitlocker and re-enable it, check to see if the key has changed, and if so repeat steps 1 and 2.

Yes, this is a pain. No, Microsoft do not make it easy. (You can do it through Settings, or, better, from the command line with manage-bde, but it's still far from obvious, particularly for non-technical users.) But it saves a ton of grief when the machine fails and you want to harvest the drives.

Of course, with work systems, the organization ought to be automatically escrowing BitLocker keys. That's just common sense. I've yet to see an IT department do that correctly, though. (For a while ours was trying to do it using InTune and some Azure-hosted Microsoft thing, but it only worked for some machines, for no apparent reason. And recovering the keys from that system was unnecessarily complicated and difficult.)

Re: Honestly....

HP LaserJet 6MP sits at my desk. Running off a USB-Parallel converter. Yeah, they will probably try to kill off the drivers in an upcoming Windows release.

I have a 4MP (technically a 4M that I upgraded by stealing the Postscript board and memory out of a broken 4MP) with a USB-parallel setup too. I found the Windows driver on a Microsoft FTP download site which is official (actually hosted by Microsoft, on the microsoft.com domain) but poorly documented. It took a bit of online research to find it and identify the correct driver files, but they worked under Windows 10. So when the time comes you may be able to use the same resource.

I have the site bookmarked but on my old laptop which isn't booted up yet. I imagine you can find it easily enough, though.

The only maintenance the 4MP has ever needed was replacing the toner cartridge — which I had to do "early" (before it ran out of toner) because the seal had degraded and it was smearing lines of toner on the page. Thing's a tank.

Re: Answered your own question

Borland also published a nice little self-guided textbook, Turbo Tutor, which taught you Pascal through the process of creating a Star Trek game. Really well done.

Re: Immortality until...

Tell it to the Electronic Literature Project. Or the Acid Free Bits project.

What you have or haven't heard might not be a particularly accurate gauge of reality.

Re: Really?

Apparently not.

Re: So it's official now.......

But seriously, if something is legally for sale in a 'democratic' country, why should the organs of state be forbidden from buying it?

Because we restrict government from doing certain things the private sector is allowed to do, in order to limit its power. Just as we do the obverse. Why should government be allowed to do everything private actors can do?

Re: Wrong target

There is ideological purity, and then there is pragmatic attempt at feasible change. Trying to rope in surveillance capitalism in the US — with the exception of some smaller targets which are not beloved by the population, such as the lesser credit bureaus — would be a waste of energy and political capital.

Re: Call for control of personal information market

If you have a common name, as I do, what you'll find is a lot of information about yourself, and a lot about other people who happen to have your name.

Sure, with appropriate queries I could narrow that down; but sometimes it helps to be the man of the crowd.

Re: Private sector

Put one NSA director in jail for deception or illegal wiretaps, just one, and watch the system correct itself in a hurry.

I greatly doubt that. You're talking about an organization made up of people (who self-select to apply for positions there) who are obsessed with information-gathering, well past the point where they're willing to take excessive risk to do so. That's more or less what spies are. What you'd get are more levels of secrecy and deniability, and there would be no shortage of ambitious lieutenants ready to take the fall for the boss should that become necessary.

Making top-level bureaucrats answer for their illegalities is a nice idea, but I don't hold any hope that it offers more than a bit of emotional satisfaction. Hegemonic surveillance states gonna surveil.

Sheldon Jacobson's been a big proponent of automated passenger screening since at least 2006. I don't recall seeing any argument from him in favor of it other than "oh noes 9/11!", though to be honest I haven't looked closely. But I'd need to see something a hell of a lot more convincing than "I say it's wrong!" before I'd bother considering his position.

And that's particularly true in this case, given the TSA's vast incompetence (as demonstrated over and over again) and the US Federal government's gleeful abuse of surveillance technologies since the PATRIOT Act. (And before then, of course, but they haven't even attempted to hide it since the legislative branch gave the executive that particular gift.)

I mean, obviously we need to improve passenger screening, given the dozens of repeats of 9/11 in the years ... oh, wait.

Re: keeping the data

Note the bill gives the TSA 90 days to destroy this information GP claims they're not retaining.

Re: Delusional narcissist

Untested and possibly incorrect. See my earlier post above. It's not clear the NBC clause applies to an acting President, as opposed to someone actually holding "the Office of President". SCOTUS would have to determine that.

Re: Delusional narcissist

This is an untested Constitutional question. See my previous post in this thread.

Re: Delusional narcissist

Not sure why this was downvoted, though it could have been phrased better.

The Natural-Born Citizen clause says "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President". How the person made it to the office — election or succession — is irrelevant; if you're not eligible, you're not eligible.

Note that the Speaker of the House's position in the POTUS line of succession is not established by the Constitution. Article II gave Congress the power to establish the line of succession (after the Veep, and then the 20th amendment broadened that somewhat), and the various Presidential Succession Acts did so. The 1947 version stuck the Speaker into his or her present place in the line.

However: Both the PSA and the 20th amendment actually use the phrase "act as President". The 20th, for example, says "the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified". The key there is act as President. It is by no means clear whether the restriction on holding "the Office of President" is also an impairment to "act[ing] as President". The 25th amendment says that the VP actually becomes President and appoints a new VP, but if both the President and VP die or otherwise become illegible in a short period, the Speaker would be in line to become acting President, and it's not clear the NBC clause applies.

I think this might be discussed in Wexler's The Odd Clauses, but my copy isn't ready to hand.

Re: Exactly what it's not

To be fair — and it's important to try to be fair when dealing with the worst — analysis of that data would be Meta's intellectual property. No individual contributing data has access to the totality of the data, or more than a tiny portion of it, in order to perform that analysis.

Certainly it can be argued that the generation and use of that information should come under regulatory scrutiny and restriction, but I don't think the "there's no IP" argument holds.

Up until the FTCs over-reach, nobody needed or wanted to.

This is both patently false and remarkably stupid. And you left out the apostrophe. Do try harder.

why nobody seemed to have a viable challenge to the structure of the executive branch regulatory bodies for the first decades of their existence

Per the article, Humphry's v. US was in 1935, nearly ninety years ago. I don't offhand know of earlier challenges, but I'd be very surprised if there weren't any.

Another historical note: Wielding the Due Process clause against regulators (Meta's other well-worn argument) has included the famous US v. Caroline Products (1938), which notably established the distinction between the "rational basis test" and "strict scrutiny". While SCOTUS has been inconsistent in applying both those standards and Stone's rationale for selecting between them, they've still been very important to jurisprudence in the US since '38.

Re: Right out of the right-wing playbook.

Yeah. These two Constitutional arguments are trotted out frequently and (as the article notes) occasionally litigated, and they're favorites of certain anti-regulation types. Tiresome.

Re: The sooner this

Indeed. Even if every government clamped down as much as they could, there would always be underground trading. People will find a way to trade and bet on just about anything.

Yes, you've missed something somewhere.

Water as a utility output — filtered, treated, and transported to point of use — is a commodity and is far from the thermodynamic equilibrium for water on Earth in general. Water that has been put to industrial use, such as cooling a data center or being similarly put to use in generating the power used by that data center, will inevitably be less-ordered and closer to equilibrium. It will be warmer; some of it will have been lost to the atmosphere and probably some to ground as well; usually it will be contaminated to some extent. Entropy has increased.

Providing more water to those points of use for continued operation thus requires energy and raw material (dirty water) inputs.

Therefore while there may still be the same number of H₂O molecules leaving the system as entered it, the actual point-of-use resource — treated and transported water — has been consumed.

I'm not sure why this patently obvious process is obscure to so many commentators here. There's a reason why businesses (and individuals) pay water utilities: they supply a commodity which is not freely available. Putting that commodity to use consumes it. Some may be recovered and recycled back into the input stream for downstream consumers, but that can be factored back into the cost of consumption unless the consumer is well outside the norm.

Your second paragraph is irrelevant to the study. The study considers water consumption for Bitcoin mining, not how that compares to water consumption by other types of data centers. There's certainly the implication in the discussion around the study (I haven't looked closely at the study itself) that this question is of interest because Bitcoin mining returns less utility than other data centers might; but that's peripheral to the study itself.

Re: Don't care

Ah, the "adoption" handwave. A great way to demonstrate that you're not willing to consider the actual practicalities.

Why can't everyone have enough food and water? There's plenty to go around. It's just a question of distribution.

(If only we could find a way to harness the power of sophomoric argumentation...)

Re: Don't care

Yes. The miners had to move from GPUs to ASICs years ago to stay competitive as the search space grew. As mining becomes unprofitable on anything other than the latest gear, previous generations are just so much fused sand.

If there were lots of old GPUs that someone wanted in abandoned mining rigs, they'd be pushing GPU prices down. That's not happening; therefore abandoned mining equipment isn't useful.

Re: Really?

Indeed. This sort of pronouncement is very useful for letting people who can think critically know you have no credibility.

This is a myth — or more precisely, the implication that the situation established by SSA 1934 remains in force is a myth.

See for example the Background section of the FTC's 2008 report on the use of SSNs in private industry, which notes:

Many SSN uses have also been legally mandated. The Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”), for example, requires private sector entities, including banks, insurance companies, and employers, to collect SSNs for income and tax-related purposes....

There appears to be broad consensus [among the experts consulted by the Commission] that the use of the SSN as an identifier – to match individuals to information about them both within an organization and between organizations – is prevalent and, in many contexts, beneficial.

The report concludes that while SSN use in private business has been a major contributor to identify theft, it's too late to "put the genie back in the bottle" and instead urges better protection of SSN data by businesses.

Of course numerous other groups and individuals have long campaigned for eliminating uses of SSNs not required by law (or with the force of law by empowered regulatory agencies and the like), and it's difficult not to sympathize with them, though we do have the problem of legitimate, consumer-serving business coordination without the use of SSNs.

Even if the operators are rationalists — and my guess is they aren't, because actually making life choices rationally carries high cognitive and affective load — I doubt that calculation works. Most operators are never brought to trial, so probable risk is low; and these behaviors indicate a risk-friendly personality in the first place.

Also, isn't the present carceral state bad enough? Frankly, I think it's unethical to advocate for longer sentences without significant prison reform first.

Re: HP Smart is innocuous enough

If you need "help" sending HP more money, then yes, it's a "helper app".

I certainly wouldn't call the damned thing "innocuous". It's a dreadful bloated pile of crap. It pops up constantly if you try to use an HP device. (Alas, we needed some sort of printer and scanner here at Mountain Fastness 1.0 and my wife bought an HP. I finally fetched my beloved 1992 LaserJet 4MP out of storage, but it's next door at MF 2.0, and I haven't moved my office there yet.) It wants personal and payment information. And if it's not riddled with security holes I'll eat my hat; I've seen what sort of software HP Ink's printer division produces.

It's no secret that HP printers and the associated software have been getting steadily worse for decades. This is just the latest example.

Re: EVs not selling?

Indeed. As if we needed another reason not to buy Tesla.

(I wouldn't anyway, because I think they're overpriced and ugly, and I won't buy a car with a touchscreen. And an EV is useless to me because it doesn't fit my use case.)

Re: Wot!

Good to know that he can touch-type, though.

I mean, I don't see how he could read the key-caps through all that foam.

Re: @The Twitter files.

I see no debunking

I'm sure that's true. For those of us who can think, though...