beltorak 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Trump's 'Cyber' Policy Against ISIS Is… 'Hey Look At This New Poll!'

    beltorak ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2016 @ 02:18pm

    Re: Re: Re: National Write-In Campaign

    Unfortunately you'll have to get a constitutional amendment passed beforehand. Snowden's only 33.

  • On the post: Hillary Clinton Thinks Real-World Military Responses To Hacking Attacks Are A Nifty Idea

    beltorak ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2016 @ 10:58am

    Re:

    Posse Comititus is a moot point when you can just get the ATF, SWAT team, or your local war-geared-up police department to start launching the mortars.

  • On the post: Hillary Clinton Thinks Real-World Military Responses To Hacking Attacks Are A Nifty Idea

    beltorak ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2016 @ 10:55am

    Re:

    well you know, when you can't respond like an adult and learn to safeguard your property because it is beyond your mental grasp, the next best thing is to act like a child and smash everyone else's toys to bits.

  • On the post: ACLU Challenges Gag Orders Issued To Tech Companies By The DOJ

    beltorak ( profile ), 01 Sep, 2016 @ 07:40pm

    Re:

    This could be an argument for that, except that it's still a pretty dumb argument. The government would just infect the home server with malware, which the secret warrant signed by a secret court would allow, and then the person would be in the same boat with regards to not knowing about the warrant, but a much worse situation regarding an advanced persistent threat touching every other machine on the home network. Given people's reluctance to update their machines even when nagged with a reminder every hour, how often do you think the forgotten about email server would receive its patches? Big brother likely wouldn't even have to dig out any 0-days for the occasion.

    If you are willing to religiously track security postings, immediately stay up to date on patches, and routinely monitor traffic logs looking for anomalies, then sure, running your own email server is a great idea. If you are hoping for a fire-and-forget appliance you can just plug into your home router, then you are much better off paying someone else to do that work. Otherwise some bored asshat with shodan is likely to pwn your ass.

  • On the post: Clinton Campaign Happily Using Strong End-To-End Encryption To Communicate; Will They Let The Rest Of Us Use It Too?

    beltorak ( profile ), 29 Aug, 2016 @ 07:42pm

    Re: "My privacy and security is important, yours not so much."

    On the other hand if she's only pro-encryption when it comes to encryption she's using then it's not a change of position at all, she's still anti-encryption in general she just realizes the value of it when it comes to her stuff, while continuing to believe that the public at large shouldn't be able to have the same level of privacy and security.

    Oh she understands the value of encryption no matter whose information it protects, make no mistake about that. There's a subtler motive at work here: she doesn't think you deserve to avail yourself of that value. It's that pervasive attitude permeating throughout the DNC that leads me to see them all, and Hillary more than most, as psychopathic snakes. It is that snide, barely obscured mentality underpinning the actions they take that is corroding the foundational philosophies of our republic. How dare you think you should have the same rights and protections as your betters. How dare you think your betters should have to follow the same laws as you.

  • On the post: If You're Learning About It From Slate, Running Your Own Email Server Is A Horrendously Bad Idea

    beltorak ( profile ), 27 Aug, 2016 @ 10:19am

    Re: UAC

    That's not a hard and fast rule. When UAC was first introduced, everyone had to ask how to turn it off.

    And I too turned it off for a few limited times. When setting up my family's computers, I'd have to perform dozens of administrator actions, and each one caused one to three UAC prompts. Ever had to create a new folder in Program Files? That caused 2 that I remember - one to create the folder, and then one to rename it :-/ Even just looking at your own environment variables required administrator permissions. So I would enable the hidden administrator (which isn't bothered by the UAC), set it up, then disable the administrator and reboot.

    Eventually MS moved the UAC boundaries to make it much less onerous, and I haven't needed to do that for a while now.

  • On the post: Former Homeland Security Advisor: Tech Companies Have The Burden Of Proving Harm Of Backdoored Encryption

    beltorak ( profile ), 22 Jul, 2016 @ 05:31pm

    Re: Homeland insecurity

    They already have tried. It was about to be foisted on us all. I think the only reason no one has bothered to fully break it was because nobody was insane enough to mandate its use. If it had been required on all telecommunications, you bet there would be cracks against the implementations (and possibly the algorithm itself) by now. Of course it's also quite likely that only criminals would know about it.

  • On the post: German Software Company Sues US Gov't For Copyright Infringement

    beltorak ( profile ), 20 Jul, 2016 @ 05:41pm

    I for one can't *wait* for the US Navy to appear at the top of the 301 report. I wonder if it's possible for the company to get a judge to order that?

  • On the post: Ton Of Tech Industry Leaders Say Trump Would Be A Complete Disaster For Innovation

    beltorak ( profile ), 15 Jul, 2016 @ 03:39pm

    Re: I can't wait

    More like a choice between drinking arsenic and tossing a lit match on a powederkeg. Sure, someday we may find a way to counteract the slow poison. On the otherhand, sometimes things are so far gone the only sensible thing to do is reduce it to rubble and start over.

    So which shall it be? Hillary "The Status is Definitely Quo" Clinton, and watch our nation slide even further towards a despotic empire from which it is increasingly more difficult to liberate ourselves? Or Donald "Fuck You, Brownskins" Drumpf, and watch a shitshow of a firestorm sprout up from every corner of the Earth?

  • On the post: Newt Gingrich: Merely Visiting An ISIS Or Al Qaeda Website Should Be A Felony

    beltorak ( profile ), 15 Jul, 2016 @ 03:07pm

    Re: Re: Help, I've felon and I can't get up!

    That just means we get to resort to kinetic strikes, right?

  • On the post: Judge Upholds UPS Employee/Paid Informant's Search Of An Intercepted Package

    beltorak ( profile ), 13 Jul, 2016 @ 02:09am

    Re: author pen name or trademarked or registered business name

    It's quite simple really. If the author sends someone something using their pseudonym, and that something is legal, then that's OK - their right to privacy remains intact. No one need know about the search that turned up nothing, and as we all know it's impossible to have your rights violated if you don't know about it. But if that something is illegal then that pseudonym becomes an alias that, even this once, was intended to distance the real person from the crime, so the search is now legal and uncontestable. And another Bad Guy gets locked up.

    Or, in the words of the Good Guys, "the ends justify the means". See?

  • On the post: Homeland Security Committee Thinks Backdoors Are Bad, But Encryption Still A Problem The Government Needs To Fix

    beltorak ( profile ), 08 Jul, 2016 @ 07:21am

    Congress and the American people have always sought to strike the right balance between the rule of law and individual liberty. Several examples illustrate this point, including ... the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in the early 1990s


    Even if you ignore the fact that the "debate" surrounding CALEA mostly involved legislators listening to law enforcement lobbying (with compromise only resulting because telcos had similar lobbying weight)


    Let's not forget it was the CALEA backdoor in the Vodafone network that was used by some still unknown party to spy on several Greek government officials.

    Let's also note that not one of those examples was the '90s encryption debate in which the "other side" - the technologists - won, in part due to Skipjack and the Clipper Chip, a poignant demonstration that the government simply isn't capable of building a "secure, good-guy only backdoor".

    Even if you buy the assertion that the cops are the good guys, every backdoor built into the systems has been used at least once (that we know of) by the "bad guys".

    How many times do we have to drum this into their heads? Backdoors make everyone less safe.

  • On the post: Judge Says FBI Can Hack Computers Without A Warrant Because Computer Users Get Hacked All The Time

    beltorak ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2016 @ 04:39pm

    Re: Both ways

    "Yeah but the computer wasn't actually hacked, it just had the possibility. We know this because our hacking tool verified that the computer hadn't been hacked after it hacked it."

  • On the post: Axl Rose DMCAs Unflattering Photo For Which He Doesn't Hold The Copyright

    beltorak ( profile ), 07 Jun, 2016 @ 03:27pm

    Re: Re: So?

    Wait, you're replying to this guy, does that mean he's serious? I thought it was satire. Seriously. I LOLed almost all the way through it. I mean,

    > On the overall scale of seriousness this kind of perjury registers rather low, almost as low as perjury before Congress by government officials while covering up systematic constitutional violations.

    Well, maybe that part wasn't facetious. That one seems dead on.

  • On the post: India Seeks To Renegotiate 47 Investment Treaties Because Of Their Corporate Sovereignty Clauses

    beltorak ( profile ), 07 Jun, 2016 @ 03:13pm

    Am i missing something

    I'm not quite so sure this is as good as it sounds. Unless there's a provision to block a corp from availing itself of a tribunal after the national courts have weighed in on the matter, all this does is tax the citizens twice when the corp exhausts the court system then takes the matter to the tribunal. If you deny the ability to avail itself of a tribunal after a court has adjudicated the matter then you have the original problem that corp sovereignty was meant to address. Even if you limit the corp's option of availing itself of the tribunal to cases where the national supreme court refused to acknowledge the merit of the corp's argument, well, there are many good reasons for things to turn out that way. I dont see any way to make an extra-juducial remittence process viable under all circumstance. All such systems are too easy to for one player or the other to game.

    Corps just need to nut the fuck up and take the risks inherent in being subject to the laws of the land. You don't like the laws? You dont trust the government? Dont fucking go there.

  • On the post: Another Court Says Law Enforcement Officers Don't Really Need To Know The Laws They're Enforcing

    beltorak ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2016 @ 06:06pm

    Ignorance of the law is {no excuse for breaking the law | excusable because the law officer had a "Good Faith" intent to uphold the law}

    I can't wait for these two "facts" to come head to head in a single court case. I wonder how the judge will resolve that conflict? I wonder if the defense lawyer will have the spine to pose the question?

  • On the post: Shameful: House Panel Votes Down Plan To Make Public Domain Congressional Research Public

    beltorak ( profile ), 24 May, 2016 @ 03:05pm

    Re: Goose...gander...do they relate????

    You mean they should be prosecuted under the espionage act for making the government look bad? No wonder even the CRS staff doesn't support the notion.

  • On the post: John McCain, Forgetting His Own Support Of Fair Use On YouTube, Tries To Use Copyright To Take Down His Own Ad

    beltorak ( profile ), 20 May, 2016 @ 02:55pm

    Politicians! Hypocrates!

    But I shouldn't have to repeat myself.

  • On the post: How Java's Inherent Verboseness May Mess Up Fair Use For APIs

    beltorak ( profile ), 16 May, 2016 @ 09:11pm

    Re:

    The case more or less shows that Oracle isn't a technology company anymore.

    Maybe this org chart comparison will clear things up.

  • On the post: How Java's Inherent Verboseness May Mess Up Fair Use For APIs

    beltorak ( profile ), 16 May, 2016 @ 09:14pm

    > The "verbose" Java syntax suggests that "public static int max(int a, int b)" is coverable by copyright, while "def max(a,b)" isn't coverable by copyright? Is it the types on the arguments or the method return that makes it eligible, or the "public", or the "static"?

    That gets even tricker when you take into account Python's optional type hints; so def max(a,b) isn't copyrightable, but def max(a: int, b: int) -> int is... ??

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