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Comment Re: They had to find suckers somewhere (Score 1) 119

Let's be real. They blew the school up because it was a school, and most likely a lot of the leadership / military families sent their girls there. And our leaders are evil bastards, working for evil bastards on behalf of other evil bastards. It's an exercise for the reader to determine the nature of those evil bastards.

Comment Re:Lidar falls short too (Score 1) 219

If Waymo's argument is valid, then humans shouldn't be allowed to drive.

Heh, there's some validity to that. Human drivers are a daily rolling disaster that society tolerates only because there hasn't been any reasonable alternative. If-and-when autonomous vehicles actually become cheap and reliable enough, I suspect that human driving will gradually start to be curtailed -- not necessarily by banning it outright, but by making licensing requirements more restrictive, by making insurance costs more onerous, and/or by "nerfing" the cars such that they simply refuse to perform dangerous maneuvers.

Comment Re:Congress won't act (Score 1) 210

Getting the votes to impeach is easy. Getting the votes to convict is de facto impossible.

I agree that has historically been the case, but OTOH Trump is deteriorating so rapidly (both psychologically and in terms of his level of popular support) that after November's bloodbath (and whatever Trump's unhinged response to that will be), the remaining Republicans may well decide it's in their own interest to get him out of office sooner rather than later.

Comment Re: It's consumption not wealth (Score 1) 143

Over 60=net tax consumers who on average radically over-consume health benefits and entitlements relative to their lifetime tax contributions. The 20,30,40,50 year old workers may be getting 'paid' by because they're servicing those patients, but those patient's checks are written by and at the expense of their children, their grand children, great grandchildren, maybe even further removed than that. In other words, those checks are both written and cashed by the very same people working that hospital, which is a peculiar sort of arrangement.

That's not to say we shouldn't take care of older folks; we should. Nor am I laying blame on those people, but that voting block is quite powerful, and continuing to live is a powerful instinct. However, it is a fact. When just one emergency can outstrip anything most people have ever scrimped and saved, it's kind of inevitable. Our entire system is just broken, and something has got to give, sooner or later.

Comment Re: It was never about "the kids" (Score 1) 97

It's dreadfully simple: if you want to keep kids off the interwebs, you have to prove you're not a kid, do you not? So you pass a law which says that as a company providing social media must effectively positively identify the entire user base in that locality. Are they going to erase that proof once a positive identification is made? Of course not! It's a value added proposition to these companies, which in addition to pitching advertisements, operate as data brokers. Positively identifying your users only means more money.
Your identity is now forever tied to your profile and posts, unless you chose to post only to obscure non-mainstream sites which have no reach.
Presto voila, anonymity is forever gone, and so is the meaningful ability to communicate perspectives which are contrary to the mainstream narrative, which is almost always completely manufactured and curated. If you dare post something that someone in a position of power dislikes for whatever reason, the police know just who hunt down, and thanks to the omnipresent surveillance networks they probably know to a very precise degree where you're at, at all times.

The stasi wished they possessed an iota of the ruthless efficiency.

Comment Re: Governments don't have the right (Score 3, Insightful) 132

You mentioned whatever a human policeman can see and memorize. That's the difference.
If all policemen had a photographic autobiographical memory, eyelids which never closed, required no sleep, were connected to a distributed consciousness which never forgot anything they ever saw and allowed them to collaborate across vast distances, and furthermore could be inexpensively placed at every intersection... I'm confident the founders would have outlawed them.

Comment Re:So it's purely symbolic? (Score 1) 93

Russia has assassinated former Russian citizens outside of Russia before, it would be unsurprising if they did it again.

I suppose they could do that, but I don't know what it would accomplish. Telegram is already written and functional; murdering Durov wouldn't uninstall it anywhere. I suppose it might intimidate the next guy who is considering writing a secure messaging app, but I don't think Russia is playing that kind of decades-long game anymore. Their main goal now is short-term: figure out how survive the Ukraine debacle without getting strung up by their own citizenry.

Comment Re:Plausible deniability is better (Score 1) 218

They don't usually do this at a border check, but if they use a forensics terminal it's not running the OS, they basically do a backdoor boot and look at what the hardware reports.

The key point here is that data's security isn't enforced by the OS, but rather by the encryption algorithm itself. A non-OS forensics terminal would see the raw contents of the hard drive, which is to say, blocks of random-looking bytes that might be encrypted data or might just be truly random; without the corresponding password, there is no way to to tell.

Without any password (and assuming a robust encryption implementation), that's as far as they'd get. With a password, they'd be able to decrypt the blocks associated with that password and view the files for that account, but not any of the other blocks/accounts.

At that point, the FBI's nerds might well suspect that there are other accounts on the phone that they don't know about, but short of coercing the phone's owner into providing additional passwords, that's as far as they could get.

Comment Re:Plausible deniability is better (Score 1) 218

If they plugged it into a forensics terminal they'd likely see right away that the device OS isn't reporting the correct blocks.

The goal would be to have a device OS with no concept of "correct blocks", i.e. there are only a bunch of blocks, all equally correct, and the OS uses some subset of them based on the password that was entered. Ideally the OS wouldn't even have the ability to tell anyone how many viable subsets there are.

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