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.

The people who say that, never supply a reason. It's just dogma.

My counter-dogma: nuh uh.

Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.

Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.

Somehow "cheap weapons able to target civilians, but not those well protected" doesn't make me feel happier. And such weapon are clearly only useful for attack, not defense.

Well, arguing from the derivation of the word is just silly, but:
https://founders.archives.gov/...
clearly shows that some of them agreed with that point of view. Hamilton, however, was only one side. Others interpreted it differently.

Actually, all that literally means is that you can carry them. It doesn't say anything about ownership or control.

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.

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.

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. ;-)

Calling that a deterrent is whitewashing it. A hypersonic missile is an attack weapon unless it is specifically an anti-missile missile. It's most highly useful in first strike situations.

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.

Actually, it's one thing to announce, it's another to manufacture at scale. If this is real, it will be a severe threat in 5 years, perhaps a bit less.

What's the range? I really doubt that this is the new MAD, but it does add a new and exciting amount of uncertainty, and increase the advantage of attack over defense.

"Well regulated" is not well defined. It definitely didn't originally mean "government approved"...or at least it didn't mean that to everyone who put their signature to it.

You're being practical, not logical. Logically the 2nd amendment implies that the right to own arms should not be restricted. AFAIK, it's never been interpreted that way by the courts.

There are lots of other places where the clear logical meaning of the US Constitution is always ignored. Often for very sound reasons.

This happens also in LOTS of other parts of the legal system. If an AI ever starts interpreting and enforcing the laws in a literal fashion nearly everyone is going to be hurt. (Sometimes the laws were even written with the intent of selective enforcement, but often I believe people just didn't notice that they implied things that weren't intended.)