Forced Exposure • Hacker News Board

Re: Forced Exposure

#421

Post by gizmo686 » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 3:22 PM UTC

joveian wrote: post #412

gizmo686 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of masking real content with gibberish always seems hacky to me, and in security hacky is not a good idea. While I suspect you might be able to make it work, I think a better solution is to go to more of a bitcoin approach. Essentially, set up a new block-chain that allows transactions to contain 'large' messages (IE. large enough for long plaintext, but probably not enough to embed videos). Then, when you w…

I don' t have a list of urls right now, but papers on the lack of anonymity of bitcoin and bitmessage are not hard to find. It is a very difficult problem against NSA level attackers. Masking when content is being exchanged by exchanging something on a fixed schedule seems like one of the few things that can be done to at least mask something. Edit: OTOH, this this does just mean they attack one or both nodes if they…

I still can't speak to bitmessage. but anonymity is not part of bitcoin's design goals.

Re: Forced Exposure

#422

Post by aclevernickname » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:19 PM UTC

TWAndrews wrote: post #160

pron wrote: post #39

I have said this on HN several times, and I will say this again. Dragnet surveillance of private digital correspondence by the US and other governments is wrong, and a gross, unjustified, overreaction to the real threat of terrorism. And yet, when taken as part of the whole picture that is the internet, government surveillance is little more than a drop in the ocean. While governments may collect a possibly significa…

Corporations can't put me in jail.

Title 28 of United States Code, Section 3002, subsection 15 (A) states that United States is a Federal Corporation [1]

So yes, corporations can indeed put you in jail.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/3002

Re: Forced Exposure

#423

Post by aclevernickname » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:34 PM UTC

lignuist wrote: post #180

jacquesm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, yes. PJ being a woman is very well known and it irks me when people automatically assume that anybody that runs a thing as successful as groklaw has to be a guy without checking. If you don't know use a gender neutral word or check, it's simple. It's not purity in language, it is paying basic respect to a person who is named several times in full in this thread.

> ... If you don't know use a gender neutral word ... "it"?

the Swedes have adopted the pronoun "Hen" [1] for exactly these purposes, to much global controversy.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/11/swedish-gender-neut...

Re: Forced Exposure

#424

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 10:18 PM UTC

nanoscopic wrote: post #247

avoutthere wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody building such systems today should have a plan for when (not if) they receive a National Security Letter.

Fuck the NSA. Dear NSA: I can and will be designing a fully anonymous open source distributed messaging system that is entirely secure even if you tap every line in the world. At the very best, you will be able to accuse people just of running the software. If you don't like this, I'd advise you that your only option is to hire me and/or pay be enough money to become disinterested in finishing the creation of the sof…

> If you don't like this, I'd advise you that your only option is to hire me and/or pay be enough money to become disinterested in finishing the creation of the software.

So, I think you just lost my trust. You're coming at this from the wrong angle, instead of coming from a princpled stance you're approaching this as a value proposition.

Too bad, up to there you had my attention.

Re: Forced Exposure

#425

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 10:24 PM UTC

Smirnoff wrote: post #406

robg wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efforts aren't illegal, in the Constitutional sense (U.S.), so long as the searches are deemed reasonable. Two branches of government (Executive and Judicial) have generally been in agreement that searches for the purposes of National Security ( very broadly defined) are reasonable. And Congress has not passed laws to the contrary. In fact, Congress has been exceedingly pliant on these issues. They've been passin…

So why can't, let's say, German citizens sue Google and alike in Germany? I am pretty sure many foreigners feel that some NSA programs are unconstitutional according to other countries' constitution. What if many foreign citizens from many countries sue internet companies for assisting the Big Brother in spying on these foreign citizens? Will that force Google to stop assisting the NSA?

The only thing that will stop Google assisting the USA is if:

1) people desert google in very large numbers

2) google moves its primary headquarters to another country

(Not the administrative center, that's just a tax trick).

Re: Forced Exposure

#426

Post by hobs » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 10:52 PM UTC

chris_mahan wrote: post #307

hobs wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, most people would say Al-Jazeera is not biased on the topics we are speaking about, but everyone has a corporate master somewhere.

see http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/al-jazeera-turning-into-...

Thanks!

Re: Forced Exposure

#427

Post by inferno0069 » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 5:54 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #346

brianpgordon wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people today do not even give pause over the idea that the government claims huge amounts of unchecked power, whether it is to fight terrorists or to expand social programs These are vastly different issues. Providing social programs doesn't infringe on anyone's rights except by taxation, which the government is constitutionally entitled to perform to any degree it wants. In contrast, the tactics employed to s…

Yea, it's really annoying how libertarians always conflate the government's abuse of military and police powers with its role in moderating the excesses of capitalism. As a lefty political activist it makes it hard to form alliances on issues that we agree on.

When they, or you, consider the latter issue to be greater than the former and don't form that alliance, you end up with the current situation.

Re: Forced Exposure

#428

Post by lukifer » Fri, Aug 23, 2013, 11:41 PM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #382

lukifer wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpack "approval" for me? Honestly, I'm in favor of any modifications to winner-take-all. "None of the Above" would be a major win for the protest vote, with a huge meta-electoral effect even if it never wins. And while it would boost morale and turnout for presidential years, the real effect would be seen if we elected Congress that way as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting Basically, you check yes or no for everyone, and the winner is the one with the most "yes" votes. Less expressive than IRV, but also simpler to understand and tabulate.

Belatedly: thanks for sharing. It does seem an easier sell, because the counting process is so easy to understand. It's not as favorable to third parties as IRV, because "[X] Minor [X] Major" obviously doesn't carry as much weight as "[1] Minor [2] Major", but at least it still kills the spoiler effect. While IRV seems more "pure" in an information theory sense, Approval is elegant in its simplicity.

Re: Forced Exposure

#429

Post by Myrth » Sat, Aug 24, 2013, 5:36 AM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #420

Myrth wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These agencies are always willing to follow the letter of the law. Only when they're not. Like one of the FBI's primary goals is to resist any law changes in favor of drug legalization.

My my, not keeping up with politics, are you? "The war on drugs is now 30, 40 years old. There have been a lot of unintended consequences. There's been a decimation of certain communities, in particular communities of color." -- Eric Holder, 2013 The Attorney General is responsible for the Department of Justice, which is in turn in charge of the FBI and DEA. Also, the FBI does not handle most drug related federal off…

> Also, the FBI does not handle most drug related federal offences. That is the DEA. Get your agencies right!

At this point I think you're just trolling everybody.

I'm not talking about enforcement, I am talking about FBI resisting drug law changes.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/speakeasy/2009/may/21/fbi_director...

Re: Forced Exposure

#430

Post by dllthomas » Sat, Aug 24, 2013, 7:08 PM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #428

dllthomas wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting Basically, you check yes or no for everyone, and the winner is the one with the most "yes" votes. Less expressive than IRV, but also simpler to understand and tabulate.

Belatedly: thanks for sharing. It does seem an easier sell, because the counting process is so easy to understand. It's not as favorable to third parties as IRV, because "[X] Minor [X] Major" obviously doesn't carry as much weight as "[1] Minor [2] Major", but at least it still kills the spoiler effect. While IRV seems more "pure" in an information theory sense, Approval is elegant in its simplicity.

That's mostly my views as well, yeah. There are a couple (narrow) weird cases with IRV, too... but IRV is unquestionably a tremendous improvement over FPTP.