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Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

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Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is for corporates to make announcements. Facebook is for people to socialize and get in touch. Linkedin is for professionals to collaborate. Google Plus is just a general purpose communication platform. HN and Reddit are for hackers and power users to discuss things. Personally, I think Reddit/HN when combined with imgur.com serves all purposes in the world, there is no need for the other bloated stuff. But u…

I don't think it's some kind of technical barrier that prevents 'non-techies' from using reddit & imgur, it's the incredibly toxic culture

Most non-Reddit users I know say they've tried looking at it, but just could not figure out the layout. Anecdotally, it took me a while to understand the layout/navigation.

Now that's not to say that once people do figure out how to navigate, they're turned off by the culture. However, I do think the UI has something to do with more people not joining.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#62
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of crime is not government invented. The majority of prisoners in prison are not there for any of the crimes you list: http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0... Besides that, the crime rate has been falling during a period coincident with aggressive policing, more incarceration, and more legal measures (RICO) to fight organized crime. While people have alternative theories for that…

Table 5 on page 17 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf of this report from BJS shows that half of federal prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. I'd accept the notion that some of those drug offenders may have been violent, but not all of them. I suspect the violent crime statistic from ProCon rests on the habit of police and prosecutors of escalating charges for suspects where drugs are found for…

Having a weapon during a drug deal is a sentencing enhancement, not a different crime. There are non-violent weapons crimes (e.g. felon in possession), but those fall under the "public order" category (see footnote c).

And remember, the vast majority of violent crimes do not fall within federal jurisdiction, so it's unsurprising that a disproportionate number of federal prisoners are in for drug crimes or other non-violent crimes (e.g. white collar crimes). But most prisoners are in state rather than federal prison.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#63
Lame but not unexpected comments from a company living off their users' data - it's quasi by definition that privacy isn't something GOOG is particularly interested in at all as the lack of it is at the very core of their own creepy business model.

Each of us info-tech "professionals" downplaying this reality by falling for GOOG marketing are not merely cattle but sheep. Cool open-source projects count as successful opinion manipulation ("marketing") as well btw (Angular, Kubernetes, etc).

I admit it, I'm a sheep meeeeeehmeeeeeehmeehmeh but it might be about time to finally change that meehmeehmeh.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#64
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of crime is not government invented. The majority of prisoners in prison are not there for any of the crimes you list: http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0... Besides that, the crime rate has been falling during a period coincident with aggressive policing, more incarceration, and more legal measures (RICO) to fight organized crime. While people have alternative theories for that…

In fairness, one could consider the "public order" "crimes" listed there to also be inventions of the state. Are legislative or prosecutorial inventiveness implicated in the increase of those from 1.9% to 13.8% of the total in less than 40 years? Over a period during which violent crime dropped precipitously, they had to do something to justify the constant construction of new prisons.

The public order category includes drunk driving and weapons offenses (mostly, felon-in-possession). Those are not inventions of the state. The public is entitled to control the possession and operation of dangerous instrumentalities that create risk of harm to others.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#65
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if they aren't being asked to build a tool, then there's nothing for them to help the FBI with because the device functions as designed. It is precisely the design of the device that the FBI wants Apple to alter using some sort of tool that Apple will make for them.

My point was just that the FBI didn't ask Apple to "build a tool for the FBI that will allow them to look at any user's data". They asked Apple to prevent some security mechanisms of that particular device from working. Whether Apple builds a tool or uses manual labour with existing tools to do so is irrelevant for the FBI.

What IS relevant for the FBI is establishing legal precedent under the Writs act for compelling them to do so.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#66
post #37

> We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face significant challenges in protecting the public against crime and terrorism. Do we? Crime rate has been falling. Terrorism is a statistical bleep. The majority of "crime" is government's own invention (non-violent drug-related offenses, prostitution, civil forfeiture, arresting people because they don't pay their student loans [1] [edit: not actually true,…

It may have been changed, but the headline of the linked article (as of approx. 8:30AM EST) is literally "U.S. Marshals didn't really arrest a man for missed student loan payments". Failure to appear (the reason he was arrested) has long been accepted as a reason for a judge to issue an arrest warrant. > According to a statement from the U.S. Marshals Service, Aker repeatedly refused to show up in court after being c…

>According to a statement from the U.S. Marshals Service, Aker repeatedly refused to show up in court after being contacted several times.

If some one called my home on the telephone and said "I'm a US Marshal, send money to pay for a 20 year old debt." or something to that effect, I'd probably interrupt the caller to tell them to put me on their Do Not Call list and then immediately hang up the phone before they ever got the chance to explain half of it. I've received much more creative attempts than that to scam me out of money over the telephone, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in that respect. I get calls from scammers all of the time, and in related news the IRS has recently warned people that scammers are calling and using that exact same pattern but pretending to be collecting an IRS debt instead of student loans. Therefore there is zero chance that I would take a telephone call like that seriously since there is zero way to authenticate the caller. We don't know whether other the marshals tried anything other than the telephone to contact Aker, but I've seen no comment from them to indicate that is the case. Assuming they've only contacted him by telephone then the proposition is that we must all obey anyone who calls us on the phone and claims to be a government agent.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#67
post #55
post #50

Apple complies with Chinese authorities and not US?

Maybe the Chinese authorities have broader power in China than the FBI has in the US.

Is China , you remember a communist country wrought with corruption . That most Americans businessmen feel is the cause of and solution to off of their problems .

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#68
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's some kind of technical barrier that prevents 'non-techies' from using reddit & imgur, it's the incredibly toxic culture

Most non-Reddit users I know say they've tried looking at it, but just could not figure out the layout. Anecdotally, it took me a while to understand the layout/navigation. Now that's not to say that once people do figure out how to navigate, they're turned off by the culture. However, I do think the UI has something to do with more people not joining.

I think the biggest plus of Reddit is its simplicity and minimalism with regards to content. For people for whom the written word is enough to understand and work with things, Reddit is an ideal platform. In case of the other platforms, the platform has to reach out to the user by including stuff like flashy animations, banners, embedded images, ajax, etc. which is always slow and unnecessary.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#69
post #49
post #37

> We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face significant challenges in protecting the public against crime and terrorism. Do we? Crime rate has been falling. Terrorism is a statistical bleep. The majority of "crime" is government's own invention (non-violent drug-related offenses, prostitution, civil forfeiture, arresting people because they don't pay their student loans [1] [edit: not actually true,…

The majority of crime is not government invented. The majority of prisoners in prison are not there for any of the crimes you list: http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0... Besides that, the crime rate has been falling during a period coincident with aggressive policing, more incarceration, and more legal measures (RICO) to fight organized crime. While people have alternative theories for that…

First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling. The same goes for violent crimes in general. Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming. If drugs were legal you would not put so many people in these situations.

Falling crime rates is happing all over the first world. Most countries have know-where near the policy infrastructure that the US has. So thats probably not a very good expiation.

Nobody says that their is no real crime. In all the speech by the state its sounds as if we are getting rolled over by a totally new wave of terror and crime while in reality its the exact opposite. What bother so many is that they underline all their arguments with this false impression.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#70
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apple has been asked to build a tool, just to help unlock a single device Aside from the non-sequitur, what Apple has been asked for is a custom build of iOS.

That's stretching the jargon a bit. I know that's what Cook said, but it could be a one-off process without the "custom build" leaving Apple's hands. Basically, comment out the time-delay and wipe code, build, sign, and push to the device. Really the most important part there is the "sign" step, and the fact that the FBI isn't straight-up asking for the signing keys is telling; they didn't want this request to escala…

They don't want the signing key because that sets the wrong precedent.

The precedent they want is that All Writs can be used to force Apple into creating a backdoor.

The next step is an online attack backdoor which slurps data over LTE from a suspect's device while it is unlocked.

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