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Comment Re:This is the right decision (Score 1) 91

You don't get to pick and choose what people post (with some obvious exceptions like fraud or csam), while also claiming immunity for the stuff you couldn't or wouldn't.

Exactly, thanks for the excellent example. That's the kind of statement that nobody ever explains, but always presents as pure axiomatic dogma.

I do think that you might have revealed a clue in your unusual phrasing, though. You said "claiming immunity for the stuff you couldn't or wouldn't" but how can there ever be any possibility of liability there? If your computer denies someone else's request to publish something, what liability is there to be immune from?

Comment Pretty Much Redundant (Score 1) 90

Especially with the upcoming M5 Max (and Ultra?) Mac Studio the Mac Pro with its eight (pretty much useless) PCIe slots is the odd one out. It doesn't make sense with the tightly integrated Apple Silicon chips, and unless they were going to make a whole separate line of more modular M-series chips for the high end it really doesn't have a place in the lineup that makes sense. I guess they could have considered putting M5 Max chips on daughterboards and made a motherboard with multiple slots for them, but it would have been even more ridiculously expensive to do that.

Comment Re:I think SCOTUS were concerned about a trap (Score 1) 91

are automakers responsible when someone breaks the speed limit and kills someone?

What's funny is that there's no such thing as "vicarious speeding" or "contributory reckless driving," but with copyright, there is. Analogously, sometimes the automaker is liable for drivers speeding!

But even so, Cox's behavior didn't fit contributory infringement.

The court just said T17 S501 is an ok law that they're not striking it down or anything like that, but it doesn't apply to this case!

A very good thing has happened.

Comment Re:Illegal (Score 0) 73

It's illegal but laws aren't currently enforced, so I don't know why you're bringing the law up.

Let's perform a natural experiment: keep saying reappropriation is illegal, and then wait for the executive to do it anyway. Then watch to see if Congress gives a fuck, by impeaching the executive (or credibly threatening to impeach if the embezzled funds aren't returned in n hours).

My hypothesis is that Congress won't do anything about it, and is fine with whatever new powers that the president decides he wants.

What's your hypothesis?

Surprise: we're actually going to do that experiment. In fact, we started it last year.

Comment Re:I give this 3 days (Score 1) 80

It's not in society's interests, but it is in government's interests. Society and government are orthogonal teams who often conflict with each other. In the US, we spelled that out explicitly in the late 1700s, but docs go back at least as far as the Magna Carta.

Alas, "spelling out" government limitations isn't the same thing as believing limits are a good idea and enforcing them, as we're occasionally reminded. The Constitution is just ink on a page, until people give a fuck about it. And in America, the constitution is currently very unpopular. Society wants to surrender to government, or if it doesn't want that, it's sure acting like it wants that.

Comment Re:That's Fine (Score 1) 80

That's pretty neat!

The danger with using unallocated space, is that sometimes you might accidentally overwrite it. But if that happens, I guess it just means you need to figure out what your new size needs to be, make a new hidden volume, and then restore from backup. It's that last step that I never remember as a possibility, probably due to my horrible backup habits. ;-)

Comment Re:Touch ID (Score 1) 80

I think that might be a bad idea, because when thugs say "hand over your phone" and you hand them a brand new phone that you have apparently never used, you're going to get wrench-based cryptanalysis. You need to be able to hand them the keys to a realistic environment that looks like it's being used. Thugs wanna see recent timestamps.

Ideally, we need to have some casual, boring (but constantly-touched!) environment that can launch encrypted environments, but somehow not have anything that references those environments.

The biggest problem I see is storage allocation. We need to be able to plausibly deny the existence of something, but also keep it from being overwritten by not-denied environments. How do you hide "don't write to these blocks, because something else uses them"?

Some might suggest hiding in plain sight with steganography, but at some point thugs will notice that everyone they suspect, just happens to have an unnecessarily-large gigaphoto. ;-)

Having alt environments that are detectable, but can be quickly destroyed the way you suggest, might be a decent compromise as long as it keeps an innocent and recently-used one around as cover. You enter the oh-fuck PIN, and it logs you into the innocent host environment but then it immediately deletes its encrypted guests, leaving you with a truly innocent machine as far as anyone can tell. And then you just really hope you can enter that duress code (or you can trick thugs into entering it) before they image your storage.

Comment Re:Next time... (Score 2) 117

The story here has nothing to do with sympathy; it's about incompetence.

"You used a n^2 query on a billions-of-records database?!"

"Well, yeah, but it's ok because the only people who use it are assholes."

That the victims of the breathalyzer's incompetent implementation happen to be people I mistrust, doesn't make the breathalyzer's makers look any less incompetent. They had one job, and they failed.

Comment No way to do that business ethically at that scale (Score 1) 92

Having lost a spouse to a (much shorter) battle with cancer, I feel bad for his family.

That said, there is no way to operate that kind of business at that scale ethically. No matter what safeguards you put in place, there will be CSAM that makes it through, or material made with adult trafficking victims, which he profited from. I don't know how one can rationalize that.

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