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Submission + - UK Prime Minister seeks to resurrect the zombie of compulsory key escrow

Dr_Barnowl writes: The BBC Reports that UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has vowed to introduce a "comprehensive piece of legislation" aimed at there being "no piece of communication" .. "which we cannot read", in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.

The only logical means by which this could occur would be by the introduction of compulsory key escrow, and the banning of forms of encryption which do not use it. While the UK already essentially has a legal means to demand your encryption keys (and imprison you indefinitely if you don't comply), this would fall short if you have a credible reason for not having the key any more (such as using an OTR plugin for your chosen chat program).

The US tried a similar tack with Clipper in the 90s.

As we all know, terrorists with any technical chops are unlikely to be affected, given the vast amount of freely available military-grade crypto now available, and the use of boring old cold war tradecraft.

Ironically, France used to ban the use of strong cryptography but has largely liberalized it's regime since 2011.

Comment Re: Who gives a fuck (Score 1) 104

While it is absolutely the case that emoji has no place in certain text fields, as a web browser it is Chrome's responsibility to handle all valid and compliant UTF-8 symbols, including emoji symbols, within the application. Emoji are not some imaginary pseudo-symbol type or image format sent in-line. Where the symbol is seen, an image from a font will be displayed instead of a conventional character. As such, is it really that different than needing to support Cyrillic characters in text fields?

It was already working. This was just allowing Chrome to use the color fonts for Emoji on Mac. They were already supporting color fonts on Linux.

Comment Re:Bets (Score 1) 340

Not possible.
You need more than a 5% edge over the other players, because for every hand you win, the house is going to take a small cut, and for every hand you lose the house will take a small cut from other players. If there is not a big sucker at the table, the players will leave and look for a better game. Thery are not going to sit around dying a slow death of small rakes to the casino. And if you can't spot the sucker, it's you.

This must be without a house. If it is optimal then two of them should get a draw, and break even. That is not possible if anyone takes a cut.

Comment Re:Bets (Score 1) 340

Recently I noticed that Texas Hold'em is only half of the game. The betting is the real strategic part. Unless the bot can do this well, I don't it will ever really "beat" a human player.

If it can beat the game and win more time that it loses by simply playing chances optimally (or force a draw), then it can basically get the same benifits as the house; always winning over time.

I didn't think that would be possible with Poker, and would love to see that in practice, but it is what they claim.

Comment Re:Thunderbolt seems inherently insecure (Score 1) 135

From what I understand, thunderbolt is essentially an external PCIe interface. That's inherently insecure. It was bad enough that Firewire gave devices DMA access, but with PCIe it will probably be 10x worse.

Not bad for a desktop (assuming you don't encrypt your disks either), but a terrible idea on a laptop, and especially if you support encryption out the box. What is the point of encryption when you give even faster access to unencrypted memory with a convinient external port?

Comment Re:Principles vs Practicality (Score 1) 220

Web apps don't count, have never counted, and never will count. That's why Apple deigned to allow people to write real apps -- something they adamantly did not want to allow when the iPhone was first released.

The iPhone was designed to only support web-apps. It was only iPhone2 that opened up for native apps after consumer and developer pressure.

Comment Re:Never had such issues (Score 1) 325

I don't know what you're doing with your laptops to cause such issues, are you working in the Sahara?

Doing actually work probably ;)

Joking aside. Some work requires a lot of CPU and that maxes out most modern laptop leaving them at their envolope temperature of 90C. Macbooks are especially reknowned for this as they overheated before everybody else copied them

Comment Re:No (Score 2) 325

These high end chips are designed to run at those temperatures. The headline speed is what you get under ideal conditions, e.g. low ambient temperature.

That doesn't mean the laptop needs to overheat. You just need a thicker laptop with a more powerful fan. Then the CPU won't reach 90c.

ThinkPad W-series, or similar thick powerful laptops is a what is needed.

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