Posts by corestore 422 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2007
1. "The inability to link IP addresses to individuals poses serious challenges for law enforcement agencies." - well THAT is code for internet passports or ID cards. It's one thing relating an IP address to a name on a bill - hell, copyright infringement lawyers have been doing that for years, going after the account holder (very dubiously). But that's obviously useless for intelligence purposes and NOT what .gov are talking about; they're demanding the ability to identify *individuals* - even on shared internet connections, public WiFi hot spots, internet cafes etc etc. That means some kind of passport or digital fingerprint...
2. There's one obvious hole in this; prepaid (and overseas roaming) cellphones, bought and paid for with cash. There's no paper trail there, no way to identify that with a specific named individual - at least not with present technology...
Very very worrying stuff.
The consequence will be obvious enough.
People are no longer willing to stand for this kind of thing.
Companies are sensitive to that mood, and are responding - hence encryption by Google, MS etc.
The cellphone companies will respond by introducing some level of authentication, to ensure that phones will ONLY communicate with genuine base stations. They're majorly pissed about this; it makes them look bad and insecure - they have no incentive to play ball with government here.
"The court ruled that it was reasonable to expect individuals that run a private Wi-Fi network to at least use the standard password security mechanisms available as part of the WLAN network device."
So if they're relying on what are considered 'standard... mechanisms that are... part of the network device', I presume they also have no objection to the use of the unsecured secondary 'guest network' facilities that are also built into many WLAN devices as standard?
Those who live by the sword of 'standard mechanisms' can also die by that same sword.
NO.
It's not designed for that. The default video behaviour is a ten second clip. If you override that... you can probably get a few minutes before Glass overheats. And you'll drain the battery pretty damn quick too. It's not designed for, or capable of, continuous recording.
The "pervo patch" is to go out and buy a spy camera concealed in a pen. Costs a tenth of what Glass costs, and no-one knows you're using it. Try again!
" if someone walked up to me wearing these glasses my *assumption* would be that I was being recorded."
'Assume' makes an 'ass' of 'u' and 'me'.
Unless you hear them say 'OK Glass, take a picture' or see their hand move to the button on the frame, and the screen light up, then you're not being recorded.
You seem to move in a rather different 'cultural milieu' from me, and (I suspect) from most of us, if there 'are always smartphones in [your] face'!
It's pointless to try to 'ban' them ever, because anyone trying to record will use *concealables* not *wearables*; they'll hide a better camera with a bigger battery in a hat or lapel or walking stick or... the possibilities are endless.
Oh and as for a few frames: fair use. You certainly CAN use a short part of a copyrighted work; it depends on the amount and the purpose.
...bollocks!
I've had Glass for a fair while now, and there's no frigging way it could be used to pirate a movie. It's designed to records seconds, or at most minutes, of video at a time.
If you tried to use it to record a frigging movie, first, the quality would be appalling unless you had a neck brace to hold your head still staring straight at the screen for two hours, second it would STILL be crappy quality, and third, it wouldn't work anyway because Glass would overheat and shut down and/or run out of battery long before the movie was half-way through.
If I wanted to pirate a movie by recording a theatrical presentation I could think of 276 ways that would work better than Glass.
Another pathetic Glass scare story.
Is wrongheaded and counterproductive.
Post Snowden, cybercrime, and snoopers, there's a real demand for privacy and anonymity online. There's a market; offering those services will sell.
ISPs shouldn't be retaining any data beyond that absolutely necessary for the operation of their systems. If there's a law trying to mandate that they retain more, ISPs will start making a sales point of circumventing it for their customers - by basing certain bits of infrastructure overseas, and by providing packages based around TOR, or TOR-like systems, which largely or entirely negate the value of any data an authoritarian snooping government may try to force them to retain.
There's a market for privacy, and this kind of law will drive ISPs to meet that market.
Quite apart from the offensive 'deemed to be' and 'compelled to remove', how in hell is any of this going to apply to the vast majority of social networking sites, which are based outside Australia and not subject to Aussie laws?!
Another severe case of what I have come to term 'Canute Syndrome'.
Microsoft.
Did they know exactly what the payload - and I use that word deliberately - of the drivers was, when they distributed them as part of Windows update?
Microsoft could be at least as much on the hook here as FTDI. If they knew, they were part of the conspiracy. If they didn't know, they distributed malware (and I can't think of any other description for something designed to brick a device) without doing due diligence.
What have they said on the matter? Register - do journalism! Dig.
To the sceptics, consider where this is coming from. This is the **Lockheed Martin Skunk Works**. They don't DO hype. They scarcely do publicity. If you don't understand who they are, and the significance of a public statement from them, do some research! If it was anyone else, I'd have very considerable reservation - but these guys have credibility. This ain't cold fusion.
"Assault weapon" is an emotive term used mainly by gun-control advocates and their opponents; it doesn't mean quite the same thing as "assault rifle".
Finally someone gets it.
An 'assault rifle' is a medium calibre, medium power military rifle, capable of select-fire (i.e. fully automatic, like a machine gun) operation. Examples would be the British SA80, the American M16, or the Russian AK47.
An 'assault weapon' isn't actually a gun at all. There's no such thing. 'Assault weapon' is a *label*, an invented derogatory neologism, intended to influence public opinion through deliberate confusion with the correct military 'assault rifle' terminology, promulgated by gun control advocates. All it means is a gun which *looks* politically-incorrect. 'scary-looking gun' would be the best transliteration. Even the legal definition is based *entirely* on cosmetic features, because a so-called 'assault weapon' actually WORKS exactly the same as any 'normal', 'less scary-looking' semi-automatic rifle.
The taxi cab replaced the horse-drawn cab.
Uber and Lyft will make the taxi cab as obsolete as the horse-drawn cab, very fast.
But it's all temporary; taxi cabs have had a very good long run. Uber/Lyft.... give it five or ten years. After that, except for a few tourists, we'll be in self-driving cabs. Powered by Google.
What a total hatchet job. I'm not saying you haven't hit on something, but you *totally* miss the point.
"But in an age of soaring prices across the city, the taxi industry has emerged as a striking example of how exclusive some corners of New York have become.
On Thursday, at the city’s first medallion auction in over five years, the largest bid for a “mini-fleet” of two medallions exceeded $2.5 million... individual medallions have also attracted ballooning sums. Today, the average market price is more than $1 million. In November 2008, it was less than $550,000."
Game over, man.
In 2014, there is STILL no way to get from NYC to JFK without changing trains. They built a shiny new train that goes around the airport - but you have to change trains from a normal commuter or subway train to get to it. Gatwick Express, Heathrow Express, OK. JFK Express? LOL. The huge politically connected taxi business with its million dollar medallions is in such tight cahoots with the city that a direct train service would NEVER be allowed.
Game over, man.
"I favour an alternative explanation: that the British police now truly believe they have the right to state that something's illegal even when that's not the case: "So what if it's not against the law, you shouldn't be doing it anyway."
DING.
There was another wonderful admission on that recently, of the truly innocent 'What, shouldn't I have said that? Why on earth not?' kind, in a connected matter: plod freely confessed that, in dealing with people trying to fly out of the UK, where there was some suspicion that they might have jihadist intentions, one tactic they were using was simply to *make them miss their flights*.
Yep. UK plod openly - nay, proudly - admitted they felt they had the power to deliberately detain people trying to leave the country at airports, not for any articulable legal reason, not for investigation, purely and only to MAKE them miss their flights.
You could NOT make it up.
"New rule: if you're going to constantly compare X government action to 1984 in the usual tiring Daily Mail way, you have to have read it first."
1. I never read the Daily Mail.
2. Newspeak.
3. Thoughtcrime
3. 'That's not watching a video, that's supporting terrorism'
4. 'That's not free speech - we'd NEVER curtail free speech - that's *propaganda*'
5. 'That's not a rifle, we would never ban rifles, that's an *assault weapon*.'
Redefine it, isolate it, destroy it, change the meme, change the language. 1984.
Almost nobody seems to know the truth behind that iconic Vietnamese execution pic. It was a good guy executing a very bad guy indeed:
"But, when you learn the story behind the man who is being executed in this photo, the image and the reasoning behind the execution becomes a little bit clearer.
This man’s name was Nguyen Van Lem, but he was also known as Captain Bay Lop. Lem was no civilian; he was a member of the Viet Cong. Not just any member, either, he was an assassin and the leader of a Viet Cong death squad who had been targeting and killing South Vietnamese National Police officers and their families.
Lem’s team was attempting to take down a number of South Vietnamese officials. They may have even been plotting to kill the shooter himself, Major General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. It is said that Lem had recently been responsible for the murder of one of Loan’s most senior officers, as well as the murder of the officer’s family.
According to accounts at the time, when South Vietnamese officers captured Lem, he was more or less caught in the act, at the site of a mass grave. This grave contained the bodies of no less than seven South Vietnamese police officers, as well as their families, around 34 bound and shot bodies in total. Eddie Adams, the photojournalist who took the shot, backs up this story. Lem’s widow also confirmed that her husband was a member of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and that he disappeared before the beginning of the Tet Offensive."
Actually no they didn't.
You want to Google this a bit. There's no actual evidence they laundered a single bloody cent. What they got fined for was paperwork errors; not having all the right forms filled in to PROVE that they WEREN'T laundering. Just that. Paperwork.
This is starting to really disturb me.
First we had the US government leaning on banks, Mastercard, & Visa, to strangle the ability of Wikileaks to conduct banking and accept donations. No court case, nothing illegal or criminal proven, all done on the quiet. 'Silent but deadly'.
Then we had 'Operation Choke Point' (Google it) - US DoJ again using pressure on banks to get them to deny banking facilities to individuals and businesses that are perfectly legal but controversial, politically incorrect, or 'morally' dubious. Again all quiet, secret, not involving the law or lawmakers.
Then the same again in the UK - HSBC closing the accounts of Islamic charities and individual Muslims and their families. Again silently, no discussion, no explanation, no publicity, nothing involving parliament or the law, 'no comment' all round.
Now this. Very disquieting. Inland revenue 'rules' and 'guidance' - completely shortcutting the courts and democratic institutions. Making financial institutions an arm of law - no, of POLICY - enforcement. They've clearly been reading Frank Herbert:
"Control The Coinage And The Courts - Let The Rabble Have The Rest!" - Emperor Shaddam IV…
Hah.
Back in... around 2000, I ported the Hercules mainframe emulator to AS/400.
Cue jaw-dropping and apoplexy in IBM, at the prospect of being able to run S/390 & z/Series software on AS/400 :-)
Oh and free trivia... Did you know the AS/400 was nearly called the System/40? Seeing as how it was a direct descendant of the System/38... but also had some compatibility with the System/3 / System/32 / System/34 / System/36 line...
And yes I have one of each, all pretty much up and running :D -
http://www.corestore.org/3.htm
Mike
The answer to that is simple, and two-pronged:
1. Email is held strongly encrypted.
2. Only the user has the key.
IF YOU DON'T HAVE, OR HAVE ACCESS TO, THE DATA, YOU CAN'T HAND IT OVER!
You so arrange things that you CAN'T hand it over in response to ANY order, subpoena, warrant, demand, or threat. You make it physically impossible.
More and more companies are going to have to build this methodology into their systems, until it's pretty universal.
The mealy-mouthed disclaimer that "we will disclose data in response to law enforcement requests", seen on so many sites and services, ENDS. It ends NOW. Enough already!
"The planned legislation demands that warrants are served in a variety of ways on a person outside the UK whose company offers a form of telecommunications to Brits."
Please to explain?
How can a British warrant under a British act have any validity or enforceability on a person or body corporate located in, say, Iceland? Surely they would operate under, and be bound exclusively by, Icelandic law?
So what is the point?
...and I make no apology for saying it again; this kind of service IS the future of the internet.
The attempts to balkanize and carve up the internet - with Google search result filtering in Europe, and 'Cleanfeed' secret censorship in the UK being the two most glaring examples - won't succeed. Customer demand is too strong. Before too long, this kind of service will be the *default* from ISPs in non-US countries. The demand is there; if ISPs don't meet it, services like unblock-us.com will.
Trying to stop or regulate the internet at national borders has a name: I call it 'Canute Syndrome'.
From the link you cite:
"There is currently a rulemaking proceeding that aims to improve the regulations on UAVs. It will take a while; indeed, you shouldn't hope for anything before 2010-2012. "
In other words is waaaaaay out of date.
Since then there's been a court case which proved the FAA's purported rules about UAV operations aren't worth the paper they (aren't) printed on; they don't exist. So as of now there ARE no rules affecting UAV operations in the USA; until the FAA get their arses into gear and go through the notice-and-comment rule making procedure, both amateur and commercial UAV/drone use is legal and unregulated in the USA.
There speaks someone who knows little about money.
GS have a pretty damn good reputation for getting it right. They're the only big bank who didn't *need* bailout money in 2008 - but of course the US gov made them take it anyway, because they wanted all the big banks to be in same boat, beholden to them.
Not relevant to the phone, but I'm a cinematographer; I have no choice but cross borders with several terabytes of digital cinema data.
As for risk profile, phone falling into unauthorized or unwelcome hands is clearly a high risk; they're very vulnerable to theft - including by less than straightforward phone thieves in the target market for this phone (think corporate espionage, both private and government-sponsored).
Physical access is ALWAYS a risk, and one that can be substantially mitigated very easily by strong whole-disk encryption, with a strong passphrase at boot time - Truecrypt-style. I can't think of a good reason for NOT making that part of the defenses for this phone, but I haven't seen it mentioned in the spec.
So, does it or doesn't it?
"both" would be a better option; Google is (at least in theory) always up to date and should have accurate real-time data on traffic density and delays.
If the satnav is internal, it's always available, but needs periodic updates and a source of real-time traffic data...
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