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People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

economist.com

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Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#11

Post by wtmt »

emmelaich wrote: post #7
_jal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a descriptive matter, yes. But from an interpersonal perspective, it is the raw material of a large change. Like a lot of tech, it favors those already in a powerful position. If you make it cheaper and easier for a nosy boss to be nosy, they will be nosier. Cops will have a field day figuring out exactly how far courts will let them push things. And so on. The potential for surreptitious sampling also opens up ne…

But if you make it cheaper, then that tilts the balance slightly toward the less well off! Not saying it's any thing equal, but imagine being able to 'get dirt' on those in power easily.

It could make it easier, but it takes a lot more effort and time for the “less well off” to expose “those in power” and be taken seriously enough to bring about change...that’s assuming they’re not harmed in the process of doing so. If information about those in power could solve problems of corruption and other evils, many problems we see today wouldn’t linger on for decades.

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#12

Post by wtmt »

What I find quite disturbing in all these privacy invading technologies is that they’re often marketed as fantastic problem solvers whereas the reality is that they have many confounding factors that put the innocent at risk. Even DNA testing is unreliable unless a lot of care is taken in the entire process.

The problem I see is that lawmakers and law enforcement want these to be taken as the gospel truth when obtained and provided as evidence in a court of law, while the judges or juries are usually not competent enough to understand the nuances and question the “evidence” to the extent necessary to not sentence an innocent person.

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#14

Post by mirimir »

VPN services, Tor and I2P do a pretty good job at blocking "molecular wakes". But even that will fail, as the devices that people use incorporate GC (and eventually, GC-MS) sensors.

As I am wont to say, privacy in meatspace is dead. Or at least, getting deader every day.

Edit: And so this is another advantage of working remotely. In particular, as a consultant.

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#15

Post by GeorgeRichard »

"The East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) ... buil[t] up a massive archive of people’s smells. Started in 1979, the collection was kept across East Germany, collected and evaluated by the Main Department XX, responsible for monitoring the East German cultural and media scene and the repression of the political opposition."[https://www.deutsches-spionagemuseum.de/en/sammlung/odour-ca...]

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#17

Post by mirimir »

> The most common way of analysing metabolite content is gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This technique sorts molecules by their weight, producing a pattern of peaks that correspond to different substances. But the same weight can be shared by many molecules, so the results may be ambiguous.

There's more to it than that. So basically you get a MS profile for each GC peak. But there are various ways to do MS. Some mainly give you masses of intact molecules, after ~gentle ionization. But some also give you masses of fragments, and that distinguishes among molecules with similar masses.

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#18

Post by emmelaich »

_jal wrote: post #10
zwkrt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If these devices were free they would still increase the power divide between those who can wield force and those who can’t. Maybe even more so.

Exactly. These things are more often a force multiplier than an equalizer.

My argument is that currently the price is effectively infinite for all but the very rich.

Now, it's a lot less.

That is to say, n/∞ << n/x.

Re: People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets

#19

Post by pontifier »

I recently had a strange thought about the human body as a bunch of different pots of soup.

They all sit on a large surface, and represent different types of fluids. One might represent the insides of your cells, another represents your blood. Another might represent the stomach, or another part of the digestive system, etc.

You have an input pot that represents what you eat, and that's the only one you can actually put ingredients in, and each pot cooks things in a different way. Your body is like a chef trying to keep the "cell soup" pot tasty, but it can only swap ladles of stuff between ajacent pots, mostly at random.

On the one hand it seems like a big mess, but on the other it feels like it has some sort of usefulness.

There really is a huge amount of chaos happening, and molecules are just kind of bouncing around and migrating randomly between regions. Using this soup-random model, it's easy to understand the wake we leave behind, as what is being spilled as things move around.

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