Posts by tom dial 2187 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2011
Have an upvote. It is worth noting, though, that constant vigilance is needed to keep reasonable regulation focused on public rather than private good. This may be especially necessary here in the US where the First Amendment to the Constitution protects the rights of the rent seekers and their agents the lobbyists, although I expect the situation is not greatly different elsewhere.
No, they won't. They will try him for some violation, or negotiate a plea bargain with an agreed maximum sentence, likely including a term of imprisonment. By reasonable and widely agreed definitions, he will not be tortured.
He never will get a US security clearance again, though.
I was with DaveDaveDave up to parts of the "counter-case."
Mr. Snowden has said he made physical delivery of all copies of the illegally copied material to the journalists, and all claims to the contrary seem to be speculation based on fairly weak circumstantial evidence. Those journalists certainly are no friends of the US government, but aside from putting the worst and most alarming spin on their articles have not shown themselves to be dishonest or spies. Absent specific evidence that would be quite hard to validate, it is reasonable to assume that Snowden is telling the truth about this.
There also is no need to think he was a spy, or acted for money. First, quite a few actual spies were motivated by considerations other than money, even many who took money as part of the deal. Second, the focus on money overly discounts the capability of some, perhaps most, people for rationalization and self-delusion. While Mr. Snowden undoubtedly is worth quite a lot to them, Mr. Snowden is pretty much stuck where he is and the Russians have little need to pay him much beyond a reasonable stipend. It also is plausible to doubt that they would pay much for information that he caused to become notorious, a great deal of which was either already publicly knowable or straightforward to infer from what was.
The US government might be better off, at least from a PR viewpoint, to drop the effort to prosecute him under Espionage Act and go for more reasonable charges based on something like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
This minor flap over a few spam emails misses a significant point, even granting that the five released probably were a very small fraction of the spam received by Secretary Clinton's privately operated server. (The messages released were only a small fraction of those she delivered to the government, and most of the spam would have been deleted by her staff when they selected those to be turned over, as not related to government business).
The article quotes one of Ms. Clinton's campaign flacks as stating that they have no evidence that the email system was breached. Quite so. There has been no report, either, that the logs were examined for such evidence, or that such logs existed at all. No evidence has been offered that the system ran any kind of protective software. The State Department unclassified network surely had vulnerabilities, and according to reports was difficult for employees to access and use when off site. The Secretary's legal and organizational duty as the top level executive in the department was to task her CIO to correct those deficiencies, not to sidestep them for personal convenience or any other reason and permit them to continue.
"[I]t isn't the email server that would have been compromised, but the client machine she was using", likely enough a desktop or laptop attached to the non-classified State Department LAN, which would be a good deal worse.
I do wonder if that is true, though, if the clintonemail.com server was being accessed through its web server. I have not seen reports that tell exactly how the setup was used.
It is much easier for a patent examiner to approve a patent (also +1 on the productivity counter, right now) than to deny it and put it in limbo for more or less endless revision and resubmission (and no "production" despite significant expenditure of time). I think that lies at the bottom of a good many rubbish patents.
Regrettable that I can upvote this only once.
Under CALEA (not FISA) telecommunication carriers are not required to decrypt, or ensure that law enforcement personnel could decrypt, communications encrypted by the end user unless they (the carriers) provided the encryption capability and possess the key ("information necessary to decrypt"). (47 USC 1002 (b)(3)). If Apple provides the encryption and retains or has access to the keying information, it appears they might be required to assist law enforcement agencies in executing warrants for encrypted data, although they might not qualify as "carriers".
[Google] "use all of those data to ensure I pay the highest price they can calculate I will pay, using all those data against me, and showing me skewed search result to ensure I won't access lower rates."
Really? That certainly is not my experience when searching for hotels in various parts of the US. A few minutes ago a search for "hotel in san francisco" gave a first page about a quarter filled with paid ads identified as such; a box listing a number of hotels,with options to sort by price, rating, or number of stars; several aggregators like hotels.com; and a reference to Mariott. Selecting "under $150" gave a list of dozens of hotels, including a fair number for well under $100 per night.
While Google's bread and butter is advertising, their ability to charge for that depends quite a bit on their search results satisfying users. The business model certainly differs from Apple's, but is not inherently wrong because of that.
Some sort of citation to a law requiring a vendor to sell particular products, especially ones that are easily available from other vendors.
For myself, I think Amazon is probably a bit stupid to do something likely to offend and alienate some customers and as someone else suggested, would be better off to offer a free app to provide compatibility to the competitors' devices. Given the rather limited Amazon streaming selection and the Fire's low price, this probably will cost them money and and possibly cost them streaming customers. And while I do watch some Amazon streaming of things unavailable on Netflix I use Roku for the old set and the built in Samsung application on the newer, so am not a candidate for either Apple TV or a Chromecast device; I will continue to purchase some things from Amazon and some from other vendors.
Many who saw the likes of Dachau immediately at the end of the War probably chose to avoid the considerable personal discomfort that came with thinking and speaking of it. A great many who did not witness that, including my own father, spoke little and rarely about their military experience during WW II.
The police are, indeed, charged with upholding the law and not with influencing it (beyond the right they have as citizens). Nothing in the article suggests they tried to do anything to effect a change in the laws or their administration, or, in fact, anything other than present an argument that TOR will facilitate some fairly nasty criminal activity. It very likely will do that, and police officers are well within their mission to point it out.
The library board appears to have been free to ignore the police in the matter, as nothing about operating a TOR exit node appears to be illegal and there are benefits as well as costs associated with it. The episode is best understood as a decision having been reached by democratic procedures that everyone involved accepted as legitimate. To suggest that this is a minor battle between "good" supporters of First Amendment principles and "bad" law enforcement agencies is simply incorrect.
TOR was developed and is supported by the US government as a tool, and like many tools can be used for various purposes, not all of them beneficial and some of them quite illegal depending on the country of use. TOR users in the US, of which I occasionally have been one, have little or nothing to fear because of that, and far less reason than residents of some other countries that most of us could name easily. Their activity may well be noticed by the NSA, but in nearly all cases without consequence to them. Widespread public knowledge of TOR makes it all but certain that many SigInt agencies other than the NSA, other Five Eyes coutries, or those of other democratic regimes, attempt to either monitor or prevent its use for purposes their governments know best.
Encryption is not the be all/end all of security; it is only one of many tools. Furthermore, it is not up to the US alone, as the allegedly leaked memo of uncertain provenance notes, to make all decisions about legal constraints on encryption or requirements for back doors or key escrow systems. The NSA and the world's other SigInt agencies will be happy if any major government requires authorized government access to encrypted data and communication streams.
In fact, though, these agencies will not care enormously about government constraints or requirements governing encryption and encryption standards, because the weak points of nearly all encryption systems are the people who use them and the hardware and software systems that implement them and on which they operate.
It has not been clear to me since the early 1990s, when the US government was going after Philip Zimmerman, restricting export of strong encryption products, and developing the Clipper and Capstone chips, just why any government would entertain the notion that they would be able to prevent criminals from encrypting communications if they chose to do so. Before PGP source code was available, before Bruce Schneier's first book on cryptography was published, the essential secrets of good encryption were available to enough smart and clever people outside government that hope of preventing its criminal use was squashed. That apparently intelligent people continue even to think about it, let alone talk about it in public, boggles the mind.
In the US, law enforcement authorities have and will continue to have substantial power to compel disclosure of encrypted data. It will not matter that the manufacturers or communication providers do not have the key and therefore cannot assist them effectively. With properly issued warrants they have the full power of the local, state, or federal government, to direct whoever does possess the decryption key to either give it up or use it to reveal the message. That is the same power they now have to compel disclosure of information encoded by procedures not implemented using computers. Some who are gulity will not be prosecuted and some who are will not be convicted as a result, although the number of cases in which encryption is at issue is small and likely to remain so. That always has been true, and it has not brought us down as much as excessive criminal legislation, prosecutor overreach, overconviction, and oversentencing.
A common language is a significant part of nationhood, as it provides the shared means to understand and discuss nearly everything. I have not done research on the question, but offer the hypothesis that national states having more than one primary language tend to be fragile and liable to experience strong separatist movements. Spain comes to mind, as does Canada, although Belgium (and Canada) seem to have managed the issue successfully, although sometimes with difficulty. Guest workers also may be problematic, as without citizenship rights and often without a right to switch from guest worker to citizen, those with secondary status may be less committed to maintenance of good order.
Although nothing much argues against immigrant groups continuing use of their native language for within-group communication, there may be a good case for requiring them to learn a single "official" language.
The advice described all is beneficial. However:
Passwords sometimes are compromised. Periodic change cam limit, to a degree, the damage that results from that.
Rate limiting is useful and certainly should be in place. However, on occasion hashed password files have been leaked, and entropy requirements, in addition to the obvious measure of blacklisting the popular ones like 1234567890, is useful in such cases in reducing the effectiveness of various attacks that process the entire file in hope of cracking a useful or profitable number of the passwords.
“We need to make sure that Europe plays a leading role to prevent advanced systems, which are used to violate human rights, falling into the wrong hands," she said.
This is much less clear cut than usually portrayed. Proper encryption technology,for instance, once was under US export restriction although it was clearly recognized to have benefits as well as potential for such activities as concealing criminal or terrorist activity. Nuclear technology might also be mentioned. Absent specific referents, statements like the above are effectively meaningless.
If e-books are priced lower than paper ones that is as it should be, as with many e-books it is difficult or impossible to sell them on or give them away so that other readers may benefit from them as is true of books on paper. They simply are worth less unless provided in an open format like text or PDF.
I have bought very few books in the last decade or two at retail, yet have accumulated a couple of thousand, all printed on paper, at prices ranging from half the retail price at Half Price Books and similar stores down to $0.25 for paperbacks and $0.50 for hardbacks at library sales. The books mostly were not new and often showed some wear, but fully met the commute and idle time recreational need.
"I, and many others, expect laws to be upheld."
There needs to be a bit of precision about exactly which laws are the subject of such statements. In the context of the article and this comment, US laws probably are being observed: those who are not "US Persons" as US law defines them, are eligible to be selected for NSA surveillance unless protected by treaty or agreements between the NSA and their SigInt agencies. Such interagency protocols are reported to limit activities by "Five Eyes" SigInt agencies against citizens of any of the five countries. Such surveillance usually would be illegal under the laws of the country in which it occurs. Similarly, US citiizens may be targeted for surveillance by another nation's SigInt agencies; such surveillance may be quite lawful according to the laws governing the SigInt agency, but quite illegal under US law if done in the US. Again, the legality might be modified by treaties or limited by interagency agreements.
Activities customarily described as "spying" or "espionage" very often include actions that are not illegal (for the spy, under his or her country's laws) and quite illegal where performed (e. g, burglary or wiretapping). Many espionage activities, or course, are unquestionably legal as well. Examples include analyzingf general or technical publications of foreign organizations; meeting and engaging in conversations with foreign nationals, either in-country (most countries) or not; and attending and participating in scientific and technical conferences.
The last paragraph suggests that Wheezy users were at increased risk due to the long interval between the 7.8 and 7.9 releases. This is not so if they applied updates regularly. I have two remaining Wheezy systems, both set to download and apply security packages automatically. That gave the following update history.
System A B
No. updates before 7.9 91 68
No. packages installed before 7.9 855 511
No. packages installed with 7.9 42 24
Or 1.47 MB (1,474,560 Bytes). That the norm is 1.44 suggests that in addition to such as memory, where the sensible unit is based on something like physical address lines, it makes sense for the K, M, G, and T units to be based on integer powers of 2 in computer contexts where they map to power of two based memory. Use of powers of 10 seems to be largely a marketing technique used for consumer storage devices; "80 GB" or "320 GB" EIDE consumer devices tend to store nearly the same number of bytes as 73 - 75 GB or 300 GB SCSI server drives.
It is reasonable to assume that it goes back to the earliest SF-86 or similar form completed by any employee in active service at the time eQIP was deployed in 2003. The uncertainty for others would relate to the probable fact that OPM was scanning and possibly doing OCR on a resources-available basis for earlier forms that those no longer in government service submitted. It is not announced whether they worked forward from the oldest paper forms or backward from the newest. Whether a hard limit would exist would depend significantly on the legal retention requirements that govern disposal, something that varies by document type. My recollection is that military payroll records must be retained well over 40 years, partly because of the complexity of military retired pay laws.
For what it is worth, exposure of SF-86 type data for most people would not be nearly as dire as generally portrayed in the press. The document does not contain much financial, medical, or criminal history data unless there is something significant, and most of the questions concern events in the last 7 years, although some of them ask about "EVER". Submission, however, includes a number of releases allowing the government to ask financial and medical institutions and law enforcement agencies for more; however, most who would be eligible for a position of public trust or security clearance would not have a lot that would facilitate blackmail, and those who omitted significant matters from the questionnaire would be relatively unlikely to gain the status requested, although it could happen as various home-grown spies have shown from time to time.
The SF-171 contained basic data similar to the SF-86 but significantly less extensive and could have been used as the starting point for a background investigation. Ordinarily was not, and an applicant for a classified position would be required to complete the more extensive SF-86 or similar document.
RSA was patented, as was Karmarkar's algorithm for solution of linear programming problems and LZW data compression. Also, of course, the algorithms MPEG LA have been squeezing for years. Some might not like it, and think it should be changed, but the facts are as they are: a cleverly described piece of mathematics can be issued a US patent.
Class actions are mostly scam and extortion, the lawyers' way to aggregate a very large number of individually small claims so as to negotiate a settlement giving themselves a big payday while netting a few pennies for the claimants. Occasionally, the net residue for the "successful" plaintiff's is donated to a charity or other beneficent organization. Of perhaps half a dozen class actions in which I have been in the plaintiff class I think I have netted a check for a single digit number of dollars and collected a number of coupons good for discounts on products I had no need or desire for.
Many articles and comments confuse between "monopoly" of search, a misnomer since the price paid for search is zero, and a possible monopoly of web-based advertising, a paid service in which they may have a large enough market position to fall under monopoly law in some jurisdictions. It appears from news reports that the complainants are not advertisers, so have no basis to complain about an advertising monopoly. Instead, they want the various governments to require placement of their services ahead of normal search results - at no cost to them.
Calling Google a search monopoly seems a bit off, since as far as anyone has claimed, it does not actually sell "search" to the gazillion people or so who use it. While it does sell advertising access, it apparently sells it on the same basis to anyone who wishes to buy, and is far from the only such seller. It appears that in India, as in Europe, the complainers are doing so because Google will not do for them, at no charge, something that, as a business model, it charges its customers for.
As far as I can tell Google is not, in India, nor in Europe, nor was it in the US, charged with using its popularity as a search engine to enable it to charge excessive rates to advertisers. It may possibly be doing that, although in view of its search popularity, it certainly would be justified in charging substantially higher rates than Bing or Yahoo. But that is not the complaint. The complaint seems to be, instead, that Google fails to place results for services that do not advertise above its own competing services.
Those who wish to have links to their services promoted above those to Google's competing services probably could arrange that as part of an advertising contract if they wish, but they should not expect such placement at no cost by government intervention.
I suspect that copyright gets into rather different territory than RTBF, as it (the 'C' in DMCA) involves a good many treaties where copyright in one country is treated as copyright in others as well. RTBF is unencumbered by such matters and is the law only in the EU. The cases are not at all comparable in scope.
RTBF probably could be extended by treaty to countries outside the EU but not, I think, the US where it appears it would conflict in a pretty straightforward way with the first amendment. As much as some of our progressives, so called, want to cripple it, the first amendment is likely to remain as is due to the difficulty of the constitutional amendment process.
Unfortunately for those who might undertake something like that, it would be difficult for a competing search engine to gain traction against Yahoo or Bing, let alone Google, unless it produced very noticeably "better" results than each of them. That is very unlikely unless the likes of Fairsearch succeed in their rent seeking and government regulation damages Google's significantly. They may need to approach it with some care, lest the rules hamper their benefactors as well.
I found Foundem's presentation mildly interesting, especially their omitting any mention or inclusion of the Foundem traffic, suggesting it is too low to show on the chart or so high that it ruins their argument. Having looked at the site, I incline to the first explanation.
Comparison shopping sites, in my opinion, are generally not very useful except in cases in which the specific product, make, and model are known, along with a range of potential suppliers and their reliability, and the only relevant consideration is price. Even then, an "organic" direct search is likely to do as well with lower effort, as a price comparison site. I routinely ignore the likes of Nextag even when it shows up in the results.
But: infrastructure to consistently deliver 99.9% or more of packets with no more than 20 ms latency may be costlier to build and operate than what is required for delivery of email where minutes of delay is likely to be somewhere between unnoticed and quite acceptable. Many of the comments here seem to relate to how the differential should be billed.
As a Netflix and occasional Amazon streaming customer I consider it in my interest if the source, intermediate, and delivery communication providers can provide consistent unpixelated video content delivery that is within the buffering capability of my TVs. That may cost more in network investment and operation, and I see no reason that the cost necessarily should be recovered in part from those who are not Netflix or Amazon customers, and it makes no difference to me whether the collection is directly from me or proxied by Netflix and Amazon, who would pass it through to me anyhow.
My guess is that network neutrality works best when network capacity at all points exceeds traffic by a factor of 5 to 10 and begins to break with increasing frequency as that factor declines from that.
In the United States, lobbying, whether or not one likes it, is rather difficult to describe as "corruption", as it is a constitutionally protected activity. The exact wording, in the First Amendment, is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
That last phrase legitimizes lobbying and makes it difficult to restrict much beyond making bribery illegal. But that may not matter greatly, as a legislator who takes side payments for exercise of official duties is as corrupt, or more, than one who offers the bribe, but is subject mostly to discipline by other members of the legislature, something that legislators seem loath to do. The Congress also may be disinclined to regulate lobbying (within First Amendment limits) because public relations firms and policy advocacy organizations always are eager to hire former legislators after they retire or their constituents dismiss them. And in the end, it is the voters who decide whether to retain a Senator or Representative because he (or she), possibly corruptly, acts to their collective benefit, or to elect someone new who will do a better job.
We (the US) certainly are increasing the number of surveillance cameras. On the other hand, I have not seen meaningful evidence of their use in either the UK or the US to affect personal liberty of, or even to track actively, those engaged in their ordinary activities, whether legal or not. Like telephone and internet metadata, they appear to be used to collect information that can be mined after a crime is committed to help identify and track suspects, or to track those suspected on other grounds of planning a crime. This is as one might expect based on the ratio of possible watchers to citizens, which I suspect in the US is well under about one per 10,000; this is much smaller than the number of police officers on patrol to citizens, which for New York City probably approaches 1 in 1000. In the middle sized suburb where I used to live there typically was about one officer on patrol for each 2500 residents and the 8 observation camera displays were visible to one officer, the shift supervisor, for every 50,000 residents.
It is likely that since the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany (if not before), every host country has conducted intense surveillance, both physical and electronic, of the entire area and its surround for months before and during the events. Given the nearness in time of the 2002 Winter Olympics to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the US might have increased surveillance beyond initial plans, but the surveillance probably would have been well into the planning stage by 2000 or early 2001 and probably would have included much or all of what actually took place.
The rush in the US to mount body cams on all police officers so as to gain proof of or prevent allegedly unprovoked police murders of unarmed civilians of color often has led the advocates to skip over a variety of considerations. Cost is one. Despite the federal government proposal to offer money for purchase of a significant number of these, the ongoing operating cost remains largely unaddressed. Another big one is privacy, noted in this article. Many police encounters are for domestic matters likely quite embarrassing to all parties and in the end often of little or no enduring interest and not worth storing (and risk of public exposure). Repositories of such videos surely would be attractive hacking targets. In addition, custody and authenticity of police or other videos of events involving police could be an issue in later court proceedings. Some of the videos that were objects of great interest in connection with claims of police misbehavior either clearly were edited (Eric Garner's arrest) or were temporarily suspected of editing (Sandra Bland's arrest). Any editing of these particular videos probably is immaterial to any subsequent legal action, but as the number increases, chain of custody and security will be a significant issue if anyone wants to use them as evidence.
As often happens, people lock onto simple answers to complex problems that are likely to be wrong or at least far from complete (credit to H. L. Mencken). Police use of body cameras may well inhibit bad behavior by both police officers and their clients, but will not end either. It is too easy for a police officer to turn off, forget or omit to turn on, or for a camera to be knocked off during an encounter that turns nasty. On the other hand, if these cameras are to be left running at all times the amount of mindless video collection is quite large, nearly 1,000 hours daily for the force in the middle sized city where I used to live that typically had 16 officers and 4 supervisors on patrol.
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