>what happens when messaging with ciphertext becomes illegal
Back in the late 90s, Ron Rivest proposed Chaffing and Winnowing [0]. In that scheme, no ciphertext is transmitted and therefore no encryption is involved; only plausible plaintext is transmitted. The receiver filters out the chaff, leaving only the intended message. Perhaps one could construct an end-to-end winnow-chaff scheme (E2EWC) to replace existing E2EE schemes.
>they were first treated as a single group of lock-step individuals by those looking to oppress them. Is it crazy that to respond, they respond as a group?
I think it plays into the propaganda of the oppressive regime by not asserting individuality. "See, they identify as the group we claimed they were the whole time," the regime would say.
That being said, there is acting as a member of a group and identifying as a member of that group. The former need not entail the latter. For instance, donating money to the ACLU doesn't change your identity to ACLU-er (et simis). No, you are just helping that cause.
>it seems pretty reasonable to assume all third-party elements on the web are hostile.
The trouble is that a lot of good and bad JS/CSS/content is gotten from third-party sites. Some websites are simply useless unless your browser loads third-party JS (e.g. Bootstrap). The ability to load third-party code/content is built into HTML and web developers naturally take advantage of that capability.
(1) Whether LE agencies are actually finding it more-and-more difficult to access devices that employ encryption. I think this is plausibly true, simply because there are more such devices being sold than ever before (from the perspective of senior LEOs).
(2) Which LE agencies is he talking about? If he is refering to all agencies, then he might be right. Many LE agencies have very limited budgets. However, if he is talking about the more well-funded and competent agencies, then he is probably wrong
>I wish there was some punishment for Government officials for lying to the public. You can be prosecuted for lying to the FBI, so why shouldn't they be prosecuted for lying to you
Get rid of the punishment for lying to LEOs and it is all fair and equal. They lie to us and we lie to them, both without punishment. It would still be illegal to lie to judges.
>(the voter, who is supposed to have the power in a democracy)
The purpose of democracy is to use elections to legitimize a limited group of persons to use the power of the State. The power of voters is limited to selecting who will be in that group. The rest of the power of the State is in the power of the hands of those who were selected.
>I’m finding that “social networks” should be a consequence of a product that solves a real problem, not that product’s raison d’etre.
Facebook mainly solves one problem: How do I keep in communication with the many people I know IRL? This is a real problem for many people, especialy when you have friends/family all over the country/world.
Any would-be strict competitor with Facebook will have to deal with a bootstrapping problem: How do you get enough people who know each other IRL to sign up and use the website?
Relaxing any one aspect of that, I think, will make success much easier:
* Enough people: You could have a niche focus (car forum) or a niche community (forum for one Eve Corp).
* Know eath other IRL: You could have an anonymous forum (4chan) or a pseudonymous forum (Reddit).
* Sign-up: Twitter, YouTube, and most forums don't require signups to view user-provided content. 4chan doesn't even require login to post.
I doubt this could ever be used to arbitrarily read minds. Even if you could do the measurements without the targer knowing, you would have to somehow correlate the target's real thoughts with those measurements. In the article, the targets voluntarily provide that correlation to measurements during a training phase. It might be the case that some neuro-physical patterns might be common across targets, but that seems very unlikely.
If the target is in your custody and you coerce him to give training data, then he could just give garbage data. You tell him to think "fish barrel neuton whale", but he really thinks "somebody once told me".
Do sub-vocalizations only occur for certain categories of thoughts? I suspect that facial memories do not induce sub-vocalizations.
"I was a racist prior to the 70s. Here's some articles where I show clear racism from that time. In the 70s I had a change of heart. Here's some articles from the 2000s where I clearly show that I am no longer a racist, but in fact the opposite of a racist."
This would not be an apology, because it doesn't stop at showing one's previous racism. It continues on to try to give evidence of current virtue as if that were a remedy for past racism. However, the real problems generated by racism are not cured by changing your position on race.
The NG article puts this in the proper context of intention:
>But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others.
Do they mean they are going to expose other magazines as being racist? While that might be historically interesting, it doesn't seem remotely professional. If they are planning to publish such exposes, then the current article is clearly an attempt to preempt the natural claims that NG was racist too.
This is an excellent article. From the Wiki article on the Dalai Lama[0]:
>Since the time of the fifth Dalai Lama, his personage has always been a symbol of unification of the state of Tibet, where he has represented Buddhist values and traditions.
This explains the interest by the Chinese Communist Party in wanting the Dalai Lama spirit to stick around. If he goes away, then political turmoil is sure to follow.
Also, this bit reminded me of an episode of Mike Judge's King of the Hill:
>They present a number of artifacts, only some of which belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, and if the boy chooses the items which belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, this is seen as a sign, in conjunction with all of the other claimed indications, that the boy is the reincarnation.
>Territorial Dispute will search files on the infected computer for file names and registry keys known to have been used by malware deployed by other nation-state hacking groups.
This seems rather easy to defeat; it is analogous to security by obscurity. You only need to learn (1) what files and registry entries that specific malware generates and (2) what subset of those are harmless. If Territorial Dispute only looks at file names, then that makes things even easier.
>Google is the weapon used by all the groups involved.
This also shows that Google is a power-deficient gate-keeper, because they are buckling under pressure over search results.
Somewhat OT: Wikipedia has a list of Swedish Jews[0], but Helle Klein, for instance, is not on that list. She does have a Wikipedia article and it clearly has her on a different list of Jews.[2] In fact, Wikipedia has a list of lists of lists of Jews.[3] Wikipedia probably gets zero flak over this fact, because there is zero neo-nazi rhetoric surrounding the lists.
Honestly, having two computers has been the only way I can sanely function at work. We have to use Windows for at least one application. My solution has been to setup a second desktop (these are small towers), install Linux on it, and remote into the Windows from the Linux machine. Oddly enough, I can actually play some video games on the Windows machine through that remote session.
We replace computers two to three times per year; I get to pick from generally four-year old computers. I assume that a second computer is not an option for most at work.
Virtues are generally disregarded by those who seek instant gratification.
Most of the times that I bring up the concept of virtue to my peers in age they seem either confused with the concept or contemptuous of it. They behave like virtue is a purely religious thing, yet caution in the face of possible danger is a very basic survival skill.
> users are treated as both beta-testers and maintainters, and are expected to find and fix bugs themselves.
FWIW, this is probably both an historical attitude and a population difference. If you and a colleague at a university just made csh to get your jobs done, then you will help each other out by doing the development. Because ya'll are also the entire userbase, then you are also the beta-testers. Back then, if you used a computer, it was because you were either developing software or entering data for a developer. Not very many non-developer users touched computers until the 80s; most people developed some kind of software, even if it was trivial BASIC programs on a Commodore.
In the OSS world, you have always been expected to contribute fixes to bugs that affected you, because the tools and source code were in your hands. For most non-developers, there exists only a lack of skill to stop them from fixing bugs or at least filing usable bug reports.
Nowadays, there are much more users who cannot or do not submit bug reports, let alone develop software. Nevertheless, the attitude since the days of csh has not changed much, because not a generation has passed since OSS went somewhat mainstream (e.g. in the data center).
Whether OSS will leave behind the historical attitude that users should be able to understand the software they use (this seems a responsible attitude to me) remains to be seen. Regardless, the developer-base will likely continue to proportionally shrink and users will proportionally become less able to understand their computers.
> Recent Intel x86 processors implement a secret, powerful control mechanism...
Recent is overflowingly unhelpful, considering AMT (a part of IME) popped up in ICH7 back in mid-2005 [0]. It is unfortunate that Doctorow is associated with this rubbish journalism.
For what its worth, anything that has DMA can takeover a CPU that is reading instructions from RAM. AMT/IME are just explicitly intended to do that.
For those concerned, and probably rightly so, about AMT/IME, the simplest solution is to use a non-Intel NIC [1]
[1] = https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-vpro-technol... ["Intel Active Management Technology communicates only through the onboard network interface of Intel vPro technology. Additional wired network interface cards are not supported and are ignored by Intel AMT."]
I think the word serverless is being used from the perspective of whether you have to maintain it yourself. Its just outsourcing, but that is a bad word so let's make a better trendy word.
Things like Bitcoin and Bittorrent would better fit the word serverless. However, you need servers of a sort for Bitcoin to work (e.g. you need nodes and miners) and you need an initial seeder for each torrent to get going.
Since serverless seems to be mostly about a class of applications, I think only those that function either without network access or without contacting any specific organizations computers (i.e. servers) would qualify. This would make my browser fundamentally serverless, since I can browse files locally. Suddenly my browser seems like a glorified file viewer and One Note is rsync with an editor attached.
> Meanwhile, public utility water outclasses bottled,
Bottled water is often just tap water.
Flint Michigan has undrinkable water as a result of decades of mismanagement from the entrenched local politicians.
The water in my city makes me nauseous to drink, so I have to buy distilled in gallon or larger containers. It is fortunate that most of my water usage is showering.
Ah, but these are anecdotes.
> Americans have been working together to foster functioning and great societies through government for ages now. It's you that wants to test this brave new world.
The victims of the Drug War (primarily poor and minorities) must live ruined lives from this "functioning and great [society] through government for ages now."
Are you sure that this is an America/California/Silicon-Valley feature? That your own internal critical voice arose as a result of growing up with your father (a German) seems to indicate that you got it from either having an immigrant parent, a German/European parent, or a parent who was just a negative nancy. I don't mean to be critical of you or your father; I mean to point out that the criticism=>negativity idea doesn't seem to be a strictly American thing.
> I think it leads to a 'shotgun approach' where if enough people "try try try" then yes some do succeed spectacularly while everyone else around them crashes and burns.
This reminds me of the Orks in Warhammer 40k, wherein the sheer psychic power of an Ork can make a war machine function; the machine would collapse if a non-Ork attempted to operate it.
I think the negativity about / criticism of oneself and one's identity (e.g. the self-effacing comic) is unique to Western civilization. Do people outside the West (e.g. Africa, Middle East, Asia, and perhaps South America) view themselves as backwards for how their lives work? Plenty of people, whether on the right or left, are critical of Western policies, especially regarding military and economic campaign in non-Western countries.
I am genuinely curious if people in non-Western countries see themselves as Westerners do (e.g. more bad than good).
This would mean that a floppy disc (hardware) and the filesystem used to arrange the bits thereon (software) are each a database. How is breaking down the distinction between database, filesystem, and storage medium helpful?
Here's a PDF version of it: https://mises.org/library/driver