I agree certainly if the official line turns out to be untrue than the rest of my thinking has to be tossed out along with it. I also agree they ought to release code and show the analysis.

Trouble is if it does implicate the Chinese they have keep it under wraps for the same reasons they won't come out and say "China" in the first place. So we don't have a good way to know if its all a false flag to justify the surveillance state as I think your suggesting or if they are being truthful with us. At least until I have a little greater personal stake in this than not seeing a probably terrible Seth Rogan movie, I guess I'll take their word for it. Now once someone start proposing legislation or invading some place, etc; than I'd be very cautious of the fact that in absence of the hard facts the very real possibility they are lying as they are know to often do exists.

Right, I think that's the important difference here if there is one. In general I agree with the GP post cyber security should be the responsibility of the network/computer operator not the government. Costs should be born by the victims and their insurers; or by the perps when they can be identified and brought to justice as a general principle.

In this case though we have a threat of violence and terror on top of the simpler criminal matter. These guys are not threatening to just empty a few bank accounts and embarrass some more celebrities. They have moved from the realm of nuisance crimes to violent crimes and the state definitely has an interest preserving public safety.

As to how credible the threat is and should we be reacting to every threat to do violence out there, well I would say they have displayed at least enough capability to hack a major corporation that no doubt has a security team. They also have at least some financial resources backed by the DPRK. So this isn't an angsty 14 year old on facebook. Do I think they can project themselves into the physical world they way they claim, probably not, but its probably not worth risking that by just ignoring them entirely either.

The official line so far is "The DPRK is responsible, but the attack originated from somewhere else".

"Responsible" most likely means hired someone to do it. Knowing the DPRK they probably paid those someones in reasonably good quality counterfeit US currency. Though that is pure speculation on my part bast on past news events.

The fact they won't tell us form where else means "China" again pure speculation on my part but common its not like DPRK has exactly normal relations with anywhere else. They would tell us if it was some other pariah regime some place, so I assume it has to be China as its the only place I can think of that DPRK would have access and would be to politically sensitive to name.

Keep in mind, I can't recall if it was 2k11 or 2k12 but the Obama admin did not exactly dispute the pentagons view that "cyber" attacks could/should be viewed as an act of war. The "terror" threats against theaters have escalated things from a criminal matter, attack on a corporation, to a state matter attack on the public and order; therefore some kind of "response" is required. I am sure 0bama is trying to find a way to "do something" or appear to be without pissing off the Chinese.

Which to now purely editorialize, I think pissing off the Chinese and souring trade relations would/could be the best possible outcome here for our nation but that is a different discussion.

Right,

I have said it before. I don't think this "girls only" stuff sends kids the right message at all. (young) Girls don't see this kind of thing as an opportunity (not my nices anyway). They see this oh computers must be really hard and it must be kinda "weird" for girls to do otherwise the adults would not be so bent on pushing it on us as a career. Its kinda like "eat your vegetables" kids know if the adults thought it was going to be a pleasant experience for them, they would let them discover it on their own and not be so insistent about it.

Honestly if we really want a post-gender/sex society where everyone is treated the same, I think we might start by trying to treat people the same. Stop emphasizing gender when we talk about people. We don't need to say "SHE is a success researcher/mathematician/computer engineer/software architect etc". We would use her name "Jane is..."

Rather than decide we are going to have a 40%+ female makeup of our middle school into to comp-sci class we would just let the kinds that want to take the elective enroll and do our best to help ALL of them succeed.

But the problem I have with this is, the WHY. I am not a big picture taker; but seriously what are really doing with 7000 pictures of anything?

Nobody is cataloging every shot, and nobody really needs the 15 shots taken in the space of 3 seconds using sports mode / virtual motor wind etc. You need the "best" shot(s) from that group.

Nobody is realistically going to want sort through 1000 shots in the album "Pictures of the kids Tuesday December 16th 2014" looking for that special memory the want to revisit, especially when the same thing exists for the day before and after.

Why not take all the pictures and at the end of the day, trip, event, maybe week, get rid the ~90% you will never want?

Honestly I can't understand having that quantity of pictures. The reason you take them is so you can look back on them, but with so many how can you ever find something really worth looking back at?

I keep a highly organized well structured system of directories. I don't know what all I got; and I delete things when I know I won't want them again. Actually its taken me years to train myself to be a little slower on the delete key trigger, space *is* cheap and its better to keep something you might want than regret having purged it later, no fun having to wait while your box huts through that multi-volume tar streamed over 5 USB sticks. I keep my entire digital life, which includes things like my music library at about 120GB. Its easy to back that all up, and I can find anything that is important quickly.

I know lots of people with TBs of stuff, and with a few exceptions where they are working with lots of raw video etc, none of them have a clue what they have. They don't do backups because the volumes are to large, etc. Mostly their lives are worse for having it. My online storage is a raid array of SSDs, I wait for nothing, not even writes ( lots of cache ). Their systems grind away sorting through a fragmented mess of junk on disk. I honestly don't get it.

Now I know the gamers might need a few hundred more GBs than I do for content; but I agree with you its really suspect when Joe Typical User is telling you he needs 6TB for anything. I would say chances are he is doing something not well considered.

Ugh,

Property taxes happen to be about the worst kind of taxes imaginable. Essentially the people who really pay them are the people you want paying them the least.

First folks with large amounts of property -- tend to be farmers. They are making productive use of the land that economically you would want to encourage not discourage. Cheap plentiful nutrition is good for a society.

Second people who don't actually own any property -- Renters of all kinds, the cost of property taxes on the occupied property are passed on.

The retired -- never mind retired folks that still live at home probably consume the least in terms of local public resources they stuck paying the taxes even without the income to support it.

No property taxes are pretty much bullshit. The only fair taxes are consumption based taxes. Want to participate in the economy you pay. Don't want to participate well that is fine.

We should move to a system of pure sales taxes and import taxes. With a few carve outs for categories like public transportation, unprepared foods for human consumption, clothing, and education; which the lower incomes earns spend disproportionately on so the system isn't overly regressive. This would also eliminate virtually all opportunities for cheating. Securities like stock should be taxes on their purchase price, buy a share for $10 you pay taxes on the $10 at purchase time, does not matter if you sell it later for $1000 or $0 there is no subsequent tax event. If you sell it the next purchaser will be paying the tax on the sale price. Lastly business must also pay sales tax on the labor they purchase from their employees; local or over seas, but there should be no other employer or payroll taxation.

There are no toilets. Seriously ever see on the show. Clearly all the replicated food is entirely observable with no metabolic outputs beyond the amount of water that can eliminated through sweat and nobody ever poops, ever.

You right, the obvious solution is just have the handsets negotiate. There is absolutely no "good" reason call setup between two cellular handsets should not feature some kind of certificate validation step between the end points followed by the exchange of uniquely per call generated symmetric key exchanged securely using the same PKI used to validate the certificate authenticity. Essentially SSL for phone calls.

People could use third party CAs like they do for the web today for most callers. Phone software should be easily configured to ONLY accept previously installed self signed certificates for certain subjects. IE if a call wants to identify itself as being from cousin bob's cellphone it will be rejected unless it its signed with the public key Bob previously gave me; even if the cert has a valid their part signature and is otherwise valid. Users could easily exchange keys in person using bluetooth + pin etc.

This would allow LEAs to eavesdrop by MTIMing calls between say an individual and a financial institution. With a warrant the third party CA the financial uses could be compelled to provide the LEA with valid cert for that subject hopefully with a expiry of only a few days. Of course techniques like cert pinning could be used to detect this by individuals. It would leave LEA's with no easy avenue to eavesdrop on calls between Bob and myself. I think this is a reasonable compromise.

On the other hand it still does nothing to address the mass surveillance concern. It will still be easy for instance for an LEA to obtain call records from the phone company. They won't have the content and won't be able to get at it, but they absolutely can know when, how long, and how often Bob and I spoke. They can also know who else Bob and I called. We know that this information is very revealing, its been used very effectively to identify relationships. Its less clear it violates the 4th than accessing the content. I don't like it but it might be again part of an acceptable compromise.

I don't think this is right. While some people no doubt feel this way, as a society we rarely complain that some people have tons of possessions and status having done relatively little work. Lots of people inherit fortunes and we don't say its undeserved.

What we do think is that people who put in a lot of effort should be compensated, and we do that with possessions and status. Which becomes a problem if nobody wants your effort anymore and you don't have possessions and status already how can you obtain them?

Technology has always been in the business of reducing labor. The upshot has always been there has been more worth doing and society's wealth has increased. Once you don't have to have everyone hunting and gather constantly it frees time up, farming produces more food with less laybor resources so you start writing. Once you discover printing writing and copying takes less time, meaning more people can start reading; and it all snowballs. Fewer people are need to produce food, they produce other things.

The last area where technology has not saved labor is thinking. Once humans are freed from having to do all the thinking there is very real possibility the machines will solve the automation of the last hard to automate physical tasks which exist. At that point labor will no longer have any value, in trade. Now individuals might take personal satisfaction in doing something by hand but nothing produced that way will be marketable.

Trying to answer how society will function if it comes to pass that only capital is valuable and there is no value in labor and little in ideas is an interesting question. We are not there yet, not by a long stretch but the potential for it is looking less science fiction like all the time.

I have seen that too. I used to live in a Cleveland suburb where the City avoided making any repairs to the street outside the local high school. This effectively held everyone to the 25MPH speed limit better than any deliberately introduced speed bumps ever could have.

I take it those were the "other concerns"

I agree but there is a good and a bad. I don't live in a gated community but my neighbors and I do have a "private road" I suppose when the lots were originally sold and the houses originally build people desired to not have drive ways running right up to US-11.

On the one hand its great. We know we can turn out of our drive ways safely. Our pets can run and there is little risk of them being hit by a cars, because there are only 7 of us along our dead end road. Naturally we all use it cautiously and respectful because we all know each other.

On the flip side its a couple miles of road that "we" have to maintain. Our little association has to pay to have it plowed and I suppose someday probably re-graded (its dirt). Until the plowman gets there we are snowed in the winter. We could probably get more prompt service but that would cost even more. We also get to pay sky high rates for home owners insurance because of the (perceived) greater fire risk. The insurance adjusters insist that responses may be longer because of the private road. I kind of doubt it, the guys at the local fire department know exactly where everything is and our road is probably at least as good as most of the public roads off US-11 in the area.

Now out in southern CA I suppose you don't have the snow concern. Still you got heat and I suspect lost of these "city folk" wont want a dirt road. Which means you going to have some sort of pavement that will require maintaining. That might prove fairly expensive. Our association considered paving the road some years before I bought in, from what I am told it was cost prohibitive to the point nobody had any interest in reviewing the idea when I brought it up.

Except that Google and Its employees are citizens with rights too. Everyone should be equal under the law. The law in Spain is now, you have to pay to link to certain types of content. Fine, Google is complying with the law, they tried to convince the people not to support it and failed, so now they are being a good citizen and obeying.

Its not Google's fault you or the news papers miss'em now that they are gone. If Google is now to be forced to operate a news aggregator, than so should every other organization or individual that has a website! That is just fair.

Speaking as a computer security professional the entire second amendment argument is juvenile and stupid, if not harmful. On top of this we continue as a society to tolerate an obviously corrupt system of double standards. I completely agree with you.

  We have corporations that now seem to operate under an entirely different set of lows than the rest of use do. We have HS and College kids being aggressively prosecuted for acts that cause tiny amounts of harm if any. Sony deploys a root-kit that puts the security of the systems of millions of customers in danger, and impairs those systems in general and they get basically asked to apologize and replace the defective product, they are not asked to do anything about the real damage. I don't recall prosecutors asking Aaron if he would like kindly remove his machine from MIT's wiring closet, delete the copies of the journals he made, tidy up and than forget the whole thing; no he was threatened with prison and a ruinous legal process until he killed himself. Yet for some reason Sony gets off without even having to clean up the mess they made.

Meanwhile the security community continues to want play army. Weather its with red vs blue rhetoric, or bizarre and ill considered Second Amendment analogies. To anything thinking person software it self and digital communications are more closely tied to the First Amendment, in terms of speech and anything you might do with a computer or network is more relate-able to expression or assembly.

A computer is not a weapon, let me repeat that a computer is not a weapon. Now it might control a weapon, be a component in or of a weapon but a computer it self is not a weapon. We don't need to conflate these things. By the logic they are using anything that can be weaponized is an arm. Which would mean I have the right to keep and bare well anything. "Sorry mister DEA agent, that brick of cocaine isn't drugs, I use it throw at people I don't like. Its a great arm, if you get hit with the corners of the package it really hurts; yet at only one kilo its light enough to carry around throw easily!" To say nothing of the implications for cars, kitchen knives etc.

This is about impotent little pricks that want to feel powerful, without having to leave their desks. The CFAA is a terrible law that is vague and potentially criminalizes lots of very innocent activity. Still I hardly think given the number of shared resources out there we want go to a total free for all where anyone can do anything the like online with no real/physical world consequences either. I am not even necessarily against "attack back" if its allowed under a prescribe limited set of circumstances, just like castle doctrines or stand your ground laws. The important parts of that though are "limited" and "prescribed" none of which applies to what Sony is doing here.