If the purpose of this were really to prevent young people from committing online indiscretions that they would later regret, the best way to do it would be by allowing anonymity and pseudonymity. Put an end to laws requiring identification, data retention and traceability. (Some online services would still require these things, but some wouldn't, and users who wanted privacy could find it.)
But of course this would clash with the other thing that all lawyers and lawmakers want: the ability to trace other people and find out what they've been up to.
I'm all in favor of crushing a bad argument with an irrefutable demonstration. I'm all in favor of educating judges. And I'm glad you won. But the judge seems to have missed the two real lessons:
1) A non-technical judge should not accept an argument about a technical discipline without evidence, and
2) there's really no limit to how fast a tech-savvy coder can generate lines of code. (Extra credit if the judge realizes that there's no upper limit to how many lines of code can be used to perform a given task.)
I agree. Brill interrupts constantly, even when he has nothing to say, and doesn't address the points where he's proven wrong. A person who works that hard to disrupt the debate usually doesn't have a leg to stand on.
(And I love the part at 31:30 when he boasts that his seminar is "hard to get into".)
Once again, I can't tell whether someone on the internet is being satirical or not.
Either you're making a subtle point about security theatre, and how it can be done at basically no cost once all the visible (and audible) cues have been removed and the security is entirely faith-based, OR you've been watching a lot of bad science fiction (including all the "CSI" balderdash) and have a 1970's grasp of what modern computers can and cannot do.
"...More power to the FBI for nailing these guys now, rather than after they actually did blow something up."
Arresting them after they'd actually blown something up was never an option. There was never any plan to blow up anything other than with the "C4" which the FBI offered.
"Let's arrest murderers before they commit murder" (with its equivalents) is almost my least favorite popular political catchphrase, coming in a close second after "if you have nothing to hide...".
It wouldn't be quite that easy. As soon as the publishers got wind of such a conspiracy (or at the latest, when one publisher was cornered this way) they would all start requiring contracts with the initial submissions, before the review and selection. So instead of 30 of the 40 authors of accepted papers cooperating, it would take 240 of the 250 authors submitting papers.
And why are CS researchers of all people so slow to route around such bottlenecks? Haven't they heard of the internet? Physicists and biologists are way ahead of them.
If only we could get people scared of alien invasion...
Nah. Scientists are plenty smart, but darn it, they just love the truth too much to tell the public that we a new state-of-the-art orbital telescope every year to keep us safe from imaginary monsters.
"If a terrorist chose not to attack the US on US territory because an attack from a US airport was no longer easy, they may have stopped many attacks."
Are you sure it wasn't the magic pebble I've been carrying since October 2001?
Any terrorist with the backing, intelligence and dedication of the 9/11 terrorists could commit an act of mass murder on U.S. soil without boarding an airplane. Granted, killing thousands in a single attack (or two) would be difficult, and the drama of 9/11 would be almost impossible to beat, but people like that wouldn't be stopped by current airport security measures even if current airport security measures worked as intended, which they don't.
So can we please stop this "look, no attacks since we banned nail clippers" routine?
"When the IT expert arrived at the police station, he found the server completely disassembled, and authorities said they could not reassemble it or give him any footage."
What possible excuse could they have for disassembling the server? Were they afraid it might have a concealed weapon?
Could someone please explain this to me? To prevent massive inflation from the sudden minting of trillions of dollars, the plan is to do the following:
"[I]f the Fed doesn’t want... to create looser money, all they need to do is reflect on the fact that two rounds of quantitative easing have left them owning over $2 trillion worth of securities of various kinds. If they sell $2 trillion worth of securities to investors, then $2 trillion will be sucked out of the economy to replicate the $2 trillion worth of platinum coins the mint cooked up."
Wait... If they sell $2 trillion worth of securities, then they'll have $2 trillion dollars to play with, which is what they wanted. So why also create $2 trillion out of nothing? Are they planning to burn the $2 trillion they get from the sale before they strike the coins?
Honestly, it's as if these people didn't play with the same blocks I did in kindergarten.
The people who push for laws like this aren't interested in building anything, and their primary goal isn't to avoid seeing what offends them. Offered a treasure house of art, literature and information, they'll spend their time delving through it to bring up the filthiest smut they can find, and then scream about it. They are following an old tribal imperative to spread their own cultural values (especially the censorious ones) and impose them on others. If they ever succeed in redacting all nudity from world culture, they'll probably feel a strange mixture of satisfaction and sadness.
They could promote their creative cultural values, but that would involve more work and satisfy an entirely different urge.
Countermeasures to lupine demolition rights represent the search for a balance between the need to respect the rights of wolves to free access and that of allowing the existence of little pigs within a defined lifespan for, uh, liberty and justice.
This balance seems challenged today. Indeed, the development of new technologies, leading to new architectural modes, (bricks, mortar, steel deadlock bolts...) and blurring the line between sty and butcher block, calls into question a law developed in part for a completely different context, and insufficiently adapted to these new measures.
This challenge is twofold. First, from a legal viewpoint, the current building codes do not take into account these new fortifications in a fully satisfactory manner. This results in an increasing reliance on methods other than blowing houses down, in particular impersonation of elderly relatives, in order to circumvent imperfections (would you like to come out and try these tasty slops?). Secondly, in terms of construction, the ease with which a brick wall may be erected seems to render meaningless the concept of masonry and raises the question of its suitability for the current context.
It therefore seemed useful to BBW L.L.C to undertake this project to take stock of the issues and, where appropriate, make recommendations to address shortcomings of the present system and attempt to define a more satisfactory balance representing a new consensus. This new balance would not be limited to amending and supplementing permission to build with bricks, it could aim to establish a "right to another day" or a "right to get a little fatter", including the development of an independent legal doctrine, enforceable before judges and on a par with slaughterhouse tradition.
It's reverse electro-magnetism! And it involves magnetic (reverse magnetic?) fields that must be in the, what, Megatesla? (Reverse Megatesla?) And it works on non-ferrous debris. Why, that's no problem at all, I'll bet Tony Stark could build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
Drones are getting smaller, cheaper and smarter. In time they'll become enough of a nuisance that anti-drone measures will become commonplace (and an ineffectual tracery of law may form around them, too).
Near-earth orbit is an even more pollutible region than urban airspace. Orbital debris is already an enormous pain; a paint flake or a machine screw travelling at orbital velocity can do serious damage to a delicate instrument (like say, a satellite), debris can stay up for a long time, and collisions just create more debris. A long-term solution will be tricky, but suffice to say a hacker group that tried to inject thousands of microsatellites into orbit without permission would make itself seriously unpopular.
I like the idea of a covert network riding legitimate hardware. Most the smartphones in a city working together could form a pretty nice one. And it could be made deniable too: a smartphone worm could create such a network, so any particular person with a file-sharing phone could plausibly be completely innocent and unaware of what was going on-- and this would be true even if no such worm had ever actually made the rounds.
"You can't hand them the data even if it's encrypted. They have no right to the files that are not infringement."
Is that a legal statement? Assuming Megaupload knows how to keep keys secure (a big assumption, I admit), MPAA's possession of the ciphertext wouldn't do the MPAA any good or the owners any harm. Then the sifting could begin: the MPAA passes a small block of data to Megaupload, which decrypts it and passes it to the judge, who looks over it and decides whether it should be made public, returned to a user, or destroyed. Then the MPAA passes another small block. This could continue for quite a while...
Which reminds me, I should read Bleak House again.
the desire to have something and yet to forbid it
If the purpose of this were really to prevent young people from committing online indiscretions that they would later regret, the best way to do it would be by allowing anonymity and pseudonymity. Put an end to laws requiring identification, data retention and traceability. (Some online services would still require these things, but some wouldn't, and users who wanted privacy could find it.)
But of course this would clash with the other thing that all lawyers and lawmakers want: the ability to trace other people and find out what they've been up to.
Re: Knowing how to code helps lawyers in many ways
Oh, I have mixed feelings about this...
I'm all in favor of crushing a bad argument with an irrefutable demonstration. I'm all in favor of educating judges. And I'm glad you won. But the judge seems to have missed the two real lessons:
1) A non-technical judge should not accept an argument about a technical discipline without evidence, and
2) there's really no limit to how fast a tech-savvy coder can generate lines of code. (Extra credit if the judge realizes that there's no upper limit to how many lines of code can be used to perform a given task.)
Re:
I agree. Brill interrupts constantly, even when he has nothing to say, and doesn't address the points where he's proven wrong. A person who works that hard to disrupt the debate usually doesn't have a leg to stand on.
(And I love the part at 31:30 when he boasts that his seminar is "hard to get into".)
Re: Re:
Once again, I can't tell whether someone on the internet is being satirical or not.
Either you're making a subtle point about security theatre, and how it can be done at basically no cost once all the visible (and audible) cues have been removed and the security is entirely faith-based, OR you've been watching a lot of bad science fiction (including all the "CSI" balderdash) and have a 1970's grasp of what modern computers can and cannot do.
Re: Shave Secret
Judging by your photo, I'd say you like it a little too much.
Re: Re: Re: C'mon people... really?
"...More power to the FBI for nailing these guys now, rather than after they actually did blow something up."
Arresting them after they'd actually blown something up was never an option. There was never any plan to blow up anything other than with the "C4" which the FBI offered.
"Let's arrest murderers before they commit murder" (with its equivalents) is almost my least favorite popular political catchphrase, coming in a close second after "if you have nothing to hide...".
Re: Mmmm
Yeah, and we have to choose between Slim Jim and a fruitcake.
Prisoner's Dilemma
It wouldn't be quite that easy. As soon as the publishers got wind of such a conspiracy (or at the latest, when one publisher was cornered this way) they would all start requiring contracts with the initial submissions, before the review and selection. So instead of 30 of the 40 authors of accepted papers cooperating, it would take 240 of the 250 authors submitting papers.
And why are CS researchers of all people so slow to route around such bottlenecks? Haven't they heard of the internet? Physicists and biologists are way ahead of them.
Re: Re: So...
If only we could get people scared of alien invasion...
Nah. Scientists are plenty smart, but darn it, they just love the truth too much to tell the public that we a new state-of-the-art orbital telescope every year to keep us safe from imaginary monsters.
Re: Re: Re:
"If a terrorist chose not to attack the US on US territory because an attack from a US airport was no longer easy, they may have stopped many attacks."
Are you sure it wasn't the magic pebble I've been carrying since October 2001?
Any terrorist with the backing, intelligence and dedication of the 9/11 terrorists could commit an act of mass murder on U.S. soil without boarding an airplane. Granted, killing thousands in a single attack (or two) would be difficult, and the drama of 9/11 would be almost impossible to beat, but people like that wouldn't be stopped by current airport security measures even if current airport security measures worked as intended, which they don't.
So can we please stop this "look, no attacks since we banned nail clippers" routine?
can't take my eyes off it
I know it's not important, but... was anyone else bothered by the phrase "fig-leaf of transparency"?
we saw a mouse run in there
"When the IT expert arrived at the police station, he found the server completely disassembled, and authorities said they could not reassemble it or give him any footage."
What possible excuse could they have for disassembling the server? Were they afraid it might have a concealed weapon?
I'm just a simple rocket scientist...
Could someone please explain this to me? To prevent massive inflation from the sudden minting of trillions of dollars, the plan is to do the following:
"[I]f the Fed doesn’t want... to create looser money, all they need to do is reflect on the fact that two rounds of quantitative easing have left them owning over $2 trillion worth of securities of various kinds. If they sell $2 trillion worth of securities to investors, then $2 trillion will be sucked out of the economy to replicate the $2 trillion worth of platinum coins the mint cooked up."
Wait... If they sell $2 trillion worth of securities, then they'll have $2 trillion dollars to play with, which is what they wanted. So why also create $2 trillion out of nothing? Are they planning to burn the $2 trillion they get from the sale before they strike the coins?
Honestly, it's as if these people didn't play with the same blocks I did in kindergarten.
And I can't believe nobody's mentioned the Mark Twain story yet.
Re: Re: What's next, web page ratings?
The people who push for laws like this aren't interested in building anything, and their primary goal isn't to avoid seeing what offends them. Offered a treasure house of art, literature and information, they'll spend their time delving through it to bring up the filthiest smut they can find, and then scream about it. They are following an old tribal imperative to spread their own cultural values (especially the censorious ones) and impose them on others. If they ever succeed in redacting all nudity from world culture, they'll probably feel a strange mixture of satisfaction and sadness.
They could promote their creative cultural values, but that would involve more work and satisfy an entirely different urge.
If only...
If only the TSA were providing security for the hearing itself. Then Mr. Schneier could walk in and testify anyway.
We feel it necessary and beneficial to huff, and furthermore to puff.
Countermeasures to lupine demolition rights represent the search for a balance between the need to respect the rights of wolves to free access and that of allowing the existence of little pigs within a defined lifespan for, uh, liberty and justice.
This balance seems challenged today. Indeed, the development of new technologies, leading to new architectural modes, (bricks, mortar, steel deadlock bolts...) and blurring the line between sty and butcher block, calls into question a law developed in part for a completely different context, and insufficiently adapted to these new measures.
This challenge is twofold. First, from a legal viewpoint, the current building codes do not take into account these new fortifications in a fully satisfactory manner. This results in an increasing reliance on methods other than blowing houses down, in particular impersonation of elderly relatives, in order to circumvent imperfections (would you like to come out and try these tasty slops?). Secondly, in terms of construction, the ease with which a brick wall may be erected seems to render meaningless the concept of masonry and raises the question of its suitability for the current context.
It therefore seemed useful to BBW L.L.C to undertake this project to take stock of the issues and, where appropriate, make recommendations to address shortcomings of the present system and attempt to define a more satisfactory balance representing a new consensus. This new balance would not be limited to amending and supplementing permission to build with bricks, it could aim to establish a "right to another day" or a "right to get a little fatter", including the development of an independent legal doctrine, enforceable before judges and on a par with slaughterhouse tradition.
Re: Re: Re: Re: foreseeable consequences
It's reverse electro-magnetism! And it involves magnetic (reverse magnetic?) fields that must be in the, what, Megatesla? (Reverse Megatesla?) And it works on non-ferrous debris. Why, that's no problem at all, I'll bet Tony Stark could build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
I also like your idea of "a thick layer of soft foam". Are you perchance thinking of six inches of foam rubber? People have actually been working on this problem for a while.
Re: Re: foreseeable consequences
Yeah, I remember when I used to love comic books. In a way I still do.
foreseeable consequences
Drones are getting smaller, cheaper and smarter. In time they'll become enough of a nuisance that anti-drone measures will become commonplace (and an ineffectual tracery of law may form around them, too).
Near-earth orbit is an even more pollutible region than urban airspace. Orbital debris is already an enormous pain; a paint flake or a machine screw travelling at orbital velocity can do serious damage to a delicate instrument (like say, a satellite), debris can stay up for a long time, and collisions just create more debris. A long-term solution will be tricky, but suffice to say a hacker group that tried to inject thousands of microsatellites into orbit without permission would make itself seriously unpopular.
I like the idea of a covert network riding legitimate hardware. Most the smartphones in a city working together could form a pretty nice one. And it could be made deniable too: a smartphone worm could create such a network, so any particular person with a file-sharing phone could plausibly be completely innocent and unaware of what was going on-- and this would be true even if no such worm had ever actually made the rounds.
Re: Re: win-win-win
"You can't hand them the data even if it's encrypted. They have no right to the files that are not infringement."
Is that a legal statement? Assuming Megaupload knows how to keep keys secure (a big assumption, I admit), MPAA's possession of the ciphertext wouldn't do the MPAA any good or the owners any harm. Then the sifting could begin: the MPAA passes a small block of data to Megaupload, which decrypts it and passes it to the judge, who looks over it and decides whether it should be made public, returned to a user, or destroyed. Then the MPAA passes another small block. This could continue for quite a while...
Which reminds me, I should read Bleak House again.