281–290 of 295 posts
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That's only true in a pure eavesdropping scenario. The keys would still allow MITM attacks.
Except for cert pinning. I think moxie is working on a general form of that right now.
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Zimmerman story was bigger, I'd say. Maybe Paula Deen too.
Zimmerman perhaps. We're still not out of that story yet so it may grow bigger with protests, etc., but it's still a US centric story. Deen even more so, Snowden has gotten a lot more international coverage.
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The implication is simple and frightening -- classify it as munitions and making illegal to possess. You know we went through this in the 1990s and PGP was de classified as a munition, yes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in... Before taking the claims at face value it's good to do a bit of background research. Also, I generally find anything where every paragraph consists only of a single s…
Exactly that was my point. It was only 20 year ago. It was declassified as munition it can be reclassified as munitions pretty easily as well. > Before taking the claims at face value it's good to do a bit of background research. It also good to read and understand the whole comment before replying. I didn't say it is illegal (in US, it is in other countries) I said it is not an unreasonably hard step to take.
As any browser has to integrate some sort of public-key cryptography support to use HTTPS, and as HTTPS is pretty useful for things like sending your credit card number over an insecure channel, I very much doubt that the genie could be put back in the bottle now.
All this increased digital surveillance comes at a time when the US Post Office is under artificial financial pressure. Just last night the news reported a plan to eliminate direct delivery to the door in favor of some sort of community mail box facilities. Interesting coincidence that physical letters (whose contents are still protected by federal statute) are being discouraged while unprotected content is being col…
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I agree with your sentiment, but want to provide a slight correction about "Free Software": MIT/BSD licensed software while not free in FSF/GPL sense, is still open and widely used and solves the problem we have right now. To avoid confusion with FSF ideals, I'd talk simply about Open Source software.
Sorry to nitpick but MIT/BSD licensed software is free in the FSF/GPL sense. To be free software, you have to respect freedoms 0-3 as defined here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . This is the case for MIT/BSD licensed software and both those licenses are considered acceptable free software licenses by the FSF. The cheklist for Open Source software can be found here: http://opensource.org/docs/osd . They…
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Do you want to be ruled by Google? By Walmart? Why is the default assumption by Statists that if the government won't rule us, corporations will? A novel concept that people may want to attempt to grasp is that there could be no rulers, and as such, there's no need to make up a fictitious "new ruler".
And this will last for approximately five minutes until a new ruler establishes themselves either through resource monopolisation or through pure threat of force. And they will never be short of toadies. Why is the default assumption by libertarians that if the government is brought down, human nature will suddenly, completely change?
It is interesting and fortunate that the NSA/GCHQ scandal was still bubbling away as a news item when the story broke about the UK government's moralizing censorship crusade. Viewing these two stories through the lens of my (inevitably dim) perspective on human nature has led me to some unsurprisingly depressing conclusions. (Apologies for the cross-posting):
You might not always get what you want, but the converse is more frequently true. For example, positions of power and authority tend to be occupied by the sort of person who actively seeks out greater power and authority. In contrast, those with no real desire to dominate and control others neither seek nor achieve power. As a result, our elite political, legal and corporate offices are inevitably dominated by an elitist, authoritarian culture and mindset. For as long as we allow people to self-select, even implicitly, there is nothing we can do to prevent this.
The authoritarian mind is characterised by a desire to dominate and control others. The more invasive, disruptive and widespread the control, the more satisfying it is to the authoritarian, and the greater the validation of their elite status.
Sex; particularly issues of sexual morality; are behavioural characteristics that are tremendously intimate, personal and difficult to rationalise/control. It is this very intimacy that makes the exertion of control over sexual behaviour so very compelling: Control over sexual behaviour is like crack cocaine to the authoritarian mind.
Time and time again throughout history, those in power have sought to control the sexual behaviour of their subjects, a motive that is exactly equivalent to the alpha male in the pack controlling access to the harem, and reminding all the beta males of their status by rubbing their noses in their inability to mate.
Technology is a lever - it gives increased power to those who wield it. Modern technology is already enabling those in power to gain greater control over their subjects. It is inevitable that technology will embed itself ever more intimately in our lives, and it is inevitable that this technology will be used by the alpha males in our society to exert their domination and suppression over the rest of the population - to mock, to belittle and to abuse those who are not in power.
Basically, as technology becomes more powerful, and exerts a greater influence over our lives, the humiliating and belittling reminders of our subservient role in society will become more and more pervasive ... and there is nothing that we can do about it.
The existence of the state - and the forceful dominance of one group over another - has always been the moral equivalent of rape - but the power of the state has always been diluted to such an extent that we have been able to persist in the illusion of freedom and self-determination. Technology is ending this dilution, and the truth of our subservient relationship to the state will forcefully re-assert itself in our everyday lives.
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What about some sort of web of trust model that has a notion of confidence. Lets say I have four people; Alice, Bob, Carol, and me. I know both Bob and Carol, but I don't know Alice directly. Since both Bob and Carol vouch for Alice, I can be fairly sure that Alice is Alice. Now lets say that Bob has reason to believe that Alice has been compromised, so he revokes his link to Alice. Now I have am less confident about…
This is how bitcoin works. The network will adopt whatever the majority agree on in terms what transactions happened. As a result, you can't man-in-the-middle bitcoin and it remains secure even without centralized key signers, because you can increase your confidence by confirming a transaction with as many nodes as you want. This is how you validate a local block chain - you connect to enough other bitcoin clients i…
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With all the outcoming gov scandals, with government forcing you to vaccine your kids... All other points aside for a moment: the government should force each and every parent to vaccinate their children. Herd immunity is a key factor in protecting most of the population from many awful diseases, and herd immunity is only effective if the vast majority are vaccinated. There's no credible evidence that vaccination cau…
Even if we are 100% clear that there is no evidence that vaccination causes any malady, government mandates requiring that the government chooses what things should be injected into every single citizen crosses a very important line of freedom of action for me. Just like the argument that you may not agree with someone but will defend their rights to say it. I may not agree with an anti-vaccination person but I would…
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Sorry, I miscommunicated. I was saying that the person you responded to was being an idiot by calling the general public drunken fools (true or not) and that it's a bad thing to lower to that level of discourse by retaliating in such a content-free manner because you won't change anybody's mind that way. I.e. your position is good, but it's only through expressing ourselves well that we can have an influence on other…
Just so you both know, from the outside, you both appear to be on the same page on the decorum issues here.
> To be clear, this is not to assert that targeted, justified intercepts should not be possible under appropriate and realistic court supervision. Why make this disclaimer? To avoid being branded a fringe anarchist? It seems to me that we should absolutely be building intercept-proof communication privacy to the best of our ability since A) there's no such thing as perfect security and B) anything of importance event…
It's worth noting that prior to the internet there was absolutely no way of creating intercept-proof communication. Whilst I don't want companies handing over the SSL keys any more than you do, we have only had truly secure communication protocols available to the public for the past 10 or so years of human history.