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Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
211–220 of 291 posts
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Metadata cannot be protected as well as the actual content can. One of the keys of good security is to ask what has to be compromised for your data to be compromised, though. If you have SSL-protected connections, BCG hijacking alone isn't going to reveal your communications but BCG hijacking along with a fake certificate issued by a trusted CA under court order or merely voluntarily) would allow a MITM attack. The t…
>Could we make it difficult enough that they would be much better going through legal channels (maybe making deals with local law enforcement or the like)? That's what I am shooting for. It is probably the best one really can shoot for. Yeah; my point was just that getting to that point (where it's easier for them to go through legal channels) is harder than it looks. It's certainly not the default state.
> Yeah; my point was just that getting to that point (where it's easier for them to go through legal channels) is harder than it looks. It's certainly not the default state.
As we went through our initial design, and started talking to others, it became quite clear that the being industry standard when it came to security is not something that either myself nor my business partner were comfortable with. We opted to start looking at everything very carefully and review eachothers' works regarding security, suggesting improvement, etc.
It's one of the reasons we decided to go hosted cloud first and only later multi-tenant.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#213Well, it's probably illegal for the US to sell its products in the EU. Certainly it's game over for the cloud industry.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something that already pissed me off when drone strikes were discussed. While not caring about foreigners is probably the most important reason, there is another one that actually makes sense, and which is why I give Americans a little bit of benefit of doubt: Given the strict protections of your constitution, it is much easier to fight the parts that concern citizens of the US. Edit: accidentally submitted a…
Drone strikes are also different. They represent currently a sort of danger to the world I don't think people really appreciate because they allow an elite to control more firepower with fewer henchmen than is possible otherwise. Air strikes are nothing new but in the past you had to contend with the fact that enough people might disobey orders to force a change of plans. With drones, the number of people you rely on…
An excellent point, but you're not going far enough.
Machine intelligence keeps getting better, so it won't be long before we have entirely autonomous drones that just need general instructions to do their job. At that point..
The democratization of weaponry is what caused the end of feudal society, concentrating it might will cause its rebirth.
For a fictional take on this, see Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#215One of the rather interesting side issues in this whole debate has been how casually the rights of foreigners are tossed aside as secondary to those of american citizens. There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else. While I understand that this is largely becaus…
As a non american; Thank you for caring!
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Could we make it difficult enough that they would be much better going through legal channels (maybe making deals with local law enforcement or the like)? That's what I am shooting for. It is probably the best one really can shoot for. Yeah; my point was just that getting to that point (where it's easier for them to go through legal channels) is harder than it looks. It's certainly not the default state.
> Yeah; my point was just that getting to that point (where it's easier for them to go through legal channels) is harder than it looks. It's certainly not the default state. As we went through our initial design, and started talking to others, it became quite clear that the being industry standard when it came to security is not something that either myself nor my business partner were comfortable with. We opted to s…
>It's one of the reasons we decided to go hosted cloud first and only later multi-tenant.
So by 'hosted cloud' you mean 'every user gets their own VM?' I mean, you could mean that you use on-demand dedicated servers, but most people mean virtual instances when they say "cloud" (I hate that word "cloud" - it's so vague)
(personally, i still think of multiple VMs on one physical box as multi-tenant. But managing a VPS per user? thousands of times easier than managing a user-account per user and just having a bunch of users on the same box. In my opinion, more secure, too.)
How are you managing images? I mean, that's the thing you've gotta watch for, a backdoor in the install image.
One thing I've noticed about my customers is that they almost all prefer to use my image than to do a net-install. (I give my xen users a paravirtualized boot loader, so they can load the distro install kernel and go from there.) the interesting thing is that my dedicated customers are far more likely to do their own install (I provide only... a very rudamentary PXE menu.)
Or, maybe that's just my perception because I only notice what OS they are running when they ask for help... whereas on the dedicated servers, I've recently had to move a bunch of them, which required me to look at consoles. So I guess there could be a bunch of arch users or something like that who just don't ask for help.
It does seem like having your own physical hardware would make... a big difference, security-wise.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drone strikes are also different. They represent currently a sort of danger to the world I don't think people really appreciate because they allow an elite to control more firepower with fewer henchmen than is possible otherwise. Air strikes are nothing new but in the past you had to contend with the fact that enough people might disobey orders to force a change of plans. With drones, the number of people you rely on…
An excellent point, but you're not going far enough. Machine intelligence keeps getting better, so it won't be long before we have entirely autonomous drones that just need general instructions to do their job. At that point.. The democratization of weaponry is what caused the end of feudal society, concentrating it might will cause its rebirth. For a fictional take on this, see Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez.
Feudal society? I think at that point you won't be looking at something that resembles fiefdoms so much as global hegemonies....
I am not sure it will get that far though. More likely it will expand until the economic stress from an oversized national security budget and rising energy prices will force it to collapse with global consequences. For the record, no, I do not think those consequences will be pleasant for anyone :-P
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something that already pissed me off when drone strikes were discussed. While not caring about foreigners is probably the most important reason, there is another one that actually makes sense, and which is why I give Americans a little bit of benefit of doubt: Given the strict protections of your constitution, it is much easier to fight the parts that concern citizens of the US. Edit: accidentally submitted a…
Drone strikes are also different. They represent currently a sort of danger to the world I don't think people really appreciate because they allow an elite to control more firepower with fewer henchmen than is possible otherwise. Air strikes are nothing new but in the past you had to contend with the fact that enough people might disobey orders to force a change of plans. With drones, the number of people you rely on…
I absolutely agree with you about drone strikes being even more dangerous. The analogy I saw was the mindset that causes people to be enraged about US citizens being killed/spied upon while being rather indifferent to the same thing happening to people in other countries.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah; my point was just that getting to that point (where it's easier for them to go through legal channels) is harder than it looks. It's certainly not the default state. As we went through our initial design, and started talking to others, it became quite clear that the being industry standard when it came to security is not something that either myself nor my business partner were comfortable with. We opted to s…
>It's one of the reasons we decided to go hosted cloud first and only later multi-tenant. So by 'hosted cloud' you mean 'every user gets their own VM?' I mean, you could mean that you use on-demand dedicated servers, but most people mean virtual instances when they say "cloud" (I hate that word "cloud" - it's so vague) (personally, i still think of multiple VMs on one physical box as multi-tenant. But managing a VPS…
We can do either but our default is vm's, just because for smaller businesses that is a lot more practical. Customers typically do not have root access to their VM's unless they supply their own keys/x509 certs so we can take ours off. If we are managing the box we have, for example, stored root passwords (rarely needed and only two people have access) encrypted in PostgreSQL (which means we do not log when we are not debugging and we do not allow history to be stored since manual keys must be entered when retrieving this info).
> How are you managing images? I mean, that's the thing you've gotta watch for, a backdoor in the install image.
It's not the only thing you have to watch out for. If someone can compromise the host they should be able to compromise all vm's given a little time. We do have some automated ways of checking for changes though. In general the physical hosts are much less exposed but cannot guarantee that more generally. We are always discussing ways to tighten security (I am considering setting up a rediculously tight selinux policy on the physical hosts).
> It does seem like having your own physical hardware would make... a big difference, security-wise.
The big difference is actually where the hardware is located. The big difference is really having your own physical hardware on your own premises on your own intranet vs using someone else's physical hardware in their datacenter, with their intranet. In general though if you have someone else's hardware on your intranet you can better control it than if you have your hardware somewhere else.
Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drone strikes are also different. They represent currently a sort of danger to the world I don't think people really appreciate because they allow an elite to control more firepower with fewer henchmen than is possible otherwise. Air strikes are nothing new but in the past you had to contend with the fact that enough people might disobey orders to force a change of plans. With drones, the number of people you rely on…
I absolutely agree with you about drone strikes being even more dangerous. The analogy I saw was the mindset that causes people to be enraged about US citizens being killed/spied upon while being rather indifferent to the same thing happening to people in other countries.
"Show me the man and I'll find you the crime" though is very much more of a problem for citizens than non-citizens and so I think that it's reasonable to say that it is a lesser problem when foreign governments are spying on non-citizens abroad than when they are spying within their own borders.
As an American I would far rather be spied upon by the Chinese or the British than the American Government. I would further expect that if a British individual was concerned about the same thing, the NSA would be far less threatening than British intelligence.