Hmm, they're using a task specialized robot to do real world things, not some delusional AI investor fleecing machine. I guess right tool for the job and all that.

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.

Only in America could you legally argue that an unnecessary profit-making middle-man was legally required and that it would somehow "reduce costs".

Philips and Bell had executives who had come up through the ranks, knew their industry, and intended to stay with the company long term. Today's executives are uniformly MBAs and lawyers who have spent their entire careers hopping from one job to another in a game of 'Executive Musical Chairs', bumping up quarterly profits with short term fixes to ensure their bonuses, hoping to not be in the corner office when the music stops and the results of their bad decisions tanks the company. What interest do they have in long term investment when by the time it bears fruit someone else will be reaping the benefits?

When my wife started working at Target the CEO had started on the sales floor three decades earlier, by 2010 there wasn't a single person in the executive offices who had ever worked at a low level retail job. The entire company was being run by people who had no idea what the employees who kept it functioning day to day actually did, and the decisions coming from Minneapolis showed it.

I put an awful lot of the blame on the introduction of the 'Business Ethics' courses in the '70s, and the flood of MBAs with no real-world employment experience in the '80s. When you have guys that have never worked a day in their lives (and six figures of debt) coming in to manage businesses about which they know little to nothing, having been erroneously taught that their one and only duty is to enrich shareholders, it's a recipe for disaster. Then combine that with executive pay plans hyper-focused on quarterly returns, and the resulting meltdown was utterly predictable and unfortunately unavoidable.

Probably humanoid robots, it's already happening in China:

https://jingdaily.com/posts/ch...

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

Doesn't work that way at AWS. All anyone in the company sees is a blob of encrypted bits to which they have no access unless the customer shares the key with them for some reason. If they have to move the data from one location to another or back it up they have to do the entire blob (that's what the data techs refer to it as, a "blob"), they have no ability to see what's in it. It's not like your local drive where the administrator can take ownership and view whatever they want. Go to AWS with a court order and they'll have to hand over the entire encrypted blob.

That's my stalker troll, I think most of its posts are done by a (fairly poorly programmed) bot. I've seen over a dozen before after a single post that I've made, it's quite pitiful. I suspect it's the same troll that has been stalking rsilvergun for the last several years, and creimer before him.

So, "whenever we wanna".

There's no such thing as technologically unable to comply.

If a nation state law enforcement insists, they will make you comply, and you and I will never hear about it.

A simple OS update with "If phone MAC == XXXXXXXXXX then send copy to FBI", targeted specifically at one phone, deployed only to that one phone, would go entirely unnoticed by the world.

And Official Secrets Act / equivalent, combined with a government-NDA and jail time for talking about it's very existence is literally routine. Has been since the days of black boxes in ISPs and them tapping Google's inter-datacentre links.

If someone like the FBI, NSA, MI5, GCHQ, etc. wants you to do something... you have literally zero choice in the matter. And talking about it will get you immediately jailed. And it really doesn't matter how big you are.

You think that Whatsapp end-to-end encryption is just going to make GCHQ etc. go "Oh well, nothing we can do?" No. If they need it, there'll be a guy knocking on your head office with a bunch of people, he'll only tell you why he's there in a closed meeting, you will comply, even if that means throwing everyone out of the datacentre and doing it yourself, and if anyone hears what he asked you to do, you will go to jail.

Been the same for decades. They just don't use it for ordinary crimes and petty stuff, mostly because of the resources they have to deploy to ensure that it stays quiet.

Iran has never been involved in any terror operations to the scale of the US. Just the Contra terrorists, directly funded, trained, armed, and directed by the US, killed a minimum of 30,000 people. The Hmongs in Southeast Asia may have approached or even exceeded that number. The Afghan mujahideen's death toll of civilians was thousands even before they became al Qaeda. The various US-funded right-wing groups in Colombia terrorized the countryside worse than the FARC. To this day the US continues to fund at least a dozen terrorist groups across Africa. All Shi'ia terrorism, whether associated with Iran or not, combined might have a death toll of a couple hundred, tops.

TFA doesn't mention a court order, so apparently they didn't even require one. They've done that repeatedly with people's iCloud data and their location data, so I'm not surprised. No idea why the fanbois seem to think that Apple gives a shit about their privacy, I've never seen any indication of it.

Russia only attacked civilian infrastructure after Ukraine spent 8 years doing it.

I'm sorry, but WTactualF? Are you unaware of the last 80 years of US military history? Damn.