Without taking a position on Readability, there's more to the calculation than client side vs. server side. For more see my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8455648
8,041 karma · joined July 10, 2012
For starters, I'd look at the Supreme Court's opinion in Grokster. Here it is in HN-suitable pseudocode. :)
IF $distributing_product_used_by_others_to_infringe == FALSE THEN
FIND_NO_LIABILITY ( "None found" )
ELSEIF $distributing_with_object_of_promoting_infringement == TRUE THEN
FIND_LIABILITY ( "You're inducing infringement ")
ELSE
IF $actual_knowledge_of_infringements == TRUE and $failed_to_block == TRUE THEN
FIND_LIABILITY ( "You're a contributory infringer ")
ELSE
IF $capable_of_substantial_noninfringing_uses == TRUE THEN
FIND_NO_LIABILITY ( "None found" )
ELSE
FIND_LIABILITY ( "You're a contributory infringer ")
END
END
END
UPDATE: A copyright lawyer friend points out via email that I neglected to include vicarious liability. I'll leave the above pseudocode as-is and note vicarious liability here as a bugfix/todo.
Ah, but from a legal perspective, this makes all the difference. It is, I'm sorry to say, copyright infringement and goes beyond what fair use permits.
You're right that it's unreasonable to place blind trust in a closed encryption system, even Apple's, that we're unable to review or audit. Even if their intentions are pure, it could be poorly implemented.
But my point is simply this: there is no U.S. law mandating key escrow for Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. One was proposed in the 1990s. It didn't pass. One was proposed in the Going Dark era 4-5 years ago. It didn't pass. One is being quasi-proposed now. It hasn't passed.
I actually think I'll agree with you on a lot of issues based on your post above -- but it is nevertheless a conspiracy theory to claim that Silicon Valley companies somehow engage in key escrow for the NSA or that there is a legal requirement for them to do so. As I said before, if you claim otherwise, URL, please.
>NSA currently requires companies (like Microsoft, Apple) to provide encryption keys corresponding to devices
PS: ^^^ I'm still waiting for the link that backs up this claim too.
Link, please?
This is simply false. It is untrue to claim that all U.S. companies have somehow "weakened" encryption or inserted backdoors in their products for the Feds. I normally wouldn't waste my time correcting conspiracy theories, but sometimes it's necessary to stop the more credulous from believing them.
Yes, the NSA has boasted of having a surveillance "partnership" with certain U.S. companies, but those are telecommunications carriers -- AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc., not Silicon Valley firms: http://www.cnet.com/news/surveillance-partnership-between-ns....
For an additional indictment of AT&T, look at the sworn affidavit that EFF obtained from local SF bay area whistleblower Mark Klein -- an AT&T technician who revealed the existence of the NSA's fiber taps at the 2nd & Folsom Street SF facility.
But the Silicon Valley companies that we know and more-or-less love have done the opposite. Look at the announcements about device encryption by Google and Apple in the last month (that have irked the Feds so much they're threatening new laws). Look at Google's Adam Langley, Wan-Teh Chang, Ben Laurie, and Elie Bursztein deploying a better TLS cipher suite in Chrome. Look at Twitter's surveillance lawsuit this week against the Feds over, apparently, the legality of a warrant canary.
And of course the two links in the conspiracy theory posted above prove the opposite of the "weaken encryption" claim. First, CALEA doesn't apply to web companies. And even the carriers it does apply to are permitted to (at 47 USC 1002(b)(3)) provide secure end-to-end encryption: "A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication."
Second, the FOIA'd doc was written in the late 1990s before the Feds liberalized encryption export controls. It's 15+ years out of date. You can now freely export strong crypto. And even in the dark days of the 1990s, there were no domestic controls on encryption use, though the TLAs did give it a shot at one point.
A better argument for the conspiracy theory set is the very odd relationship between EMC Corporation's RSA business unit and NSA. But even if allegations of intentional security flaws are true, EMC is a Massachusetts company, not a left coast firm, and a cozy relationship between the NSA and EMC/AT&T/VZ/etc. certainly does not indict all companies and their founders.
Ron C. added: "People in their 20s are the good pickers," and said he wants his investment team at SV Angel to recruit younger folks to join them by the time they hit 30 years old. He said that older and more experienced investors are better at giving advice to the companies they fund.
In other words, the "age bigot" quip refers to the people picking the investments, not the people receiving investments. I don't know what Ron C's views are about younger vs. older founders, and as far as I recall he didn't make them apparent today.
A few years afterward CNET began to transition many sites including news.com and zdnet.com over to suffixes ending in .com.com; I vaguely recall being told that it was to enable CNET-network-wide cookies without that era's browsers pitching a fit. (Note the Wayback Machine indexed it as zdnet.com.com only after 2002.)
Eventually I helped (I was not alone but was the most vocal) to make the switch away from news.com.com to news.com, which made more sense and served readers better. Of course I've since left to found http://recent.io/, but thought I'd inject a little history as someone who worked at CNET Networks during part of that .com.com time.
http://www.cnet.com/news/from-wargames-to-aaron-swartz-how-u...
the CFAA's punishments, drafted during a post-WarGames computer hacking scare and designed to deter intrusions into NORAD, threatened Swartz with stiffer penalties than if he had been convicted of assault with an actual crowbar...
"WarGames" inspired these extra-long prison terms. As soon as it was released in June 1983, the movie, starring Matthew Broderick as a teenage hacker who broke into NORAD's mainframe and nearly ignited World War III, electrified Capitol Hill and kicked off an anti-hacker panic...
No fewer than six different anti-hacking bills were introduced that year, and Congress convened its first hearings as soon as politicians returned from their summer recess. Rep. Dan Glickman, a Kansas Democrat, opened the proceedings by saying: "We're gonna show about four minutes from the movie 'WarGames,' which I think outlines the problem fairly clearly." A House committee report solemnly intoned: "'WarGames' showed a realistic representation of the automatic dialing and access capabilities of the personal computer."...
Also look at the sworn affidavit that EFF obtained from local SF bay area whistleblower Mark Klein -- an AT&T technician who revealed the existence of the NSA's fiber taps at the 2nd & Folsom Street SF facility.
There is no such entity as "major American industry." There are different companies with different incentives and different willingnesses to protect their users. Some companies do the right thing; others don't.
Some excerpts from that self-critique:
"Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is. ... These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/the-public-editor-...
"if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world...
"On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires. This has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one's own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning...
The NYT is a remarkable institution capable of arguably the best news reporting on the planet when it collectively sets its mind to a task. It will cover the difficult local topics like NYC homelessness and public school failures that are a poorer fit for the Post or WSJ. I have friends who work there; my editor before I left to found recent.io is now a NYT editor. But the above critique was true when written in 2004 and is even more true today.
I'm not aware of a 2A case on point regarding firearm manufacturing (others may know more), perhaps because the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act offered sufficient protection. I am aware of a case on point regarding selling firearms. Earlier this year, Chicago's ban on selling firearms was ruled unconstitutional: http://www.volokh.com/2014/01/06/firearm-may-sold-acquired-o...
This makes sense if you think about it. The First Amendment right to freedom of the press wouldn't mean much if the Feds can levy a 10,000% tax on newsprint. Which is why the Supreme Court has held that such taxes violate the First Amendment: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vo...
I've written a bit about infectious diseases but defer to virologists or other folks who are better informed. I do remember reading these two articles about airborne transmission of Ebola, which might be what the previous poster was thinking about:
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00... EBOV infection in swine affects mainly respiratory tract, implicating a potential for airborne transmission of ZEBOV2, 6. Contact exposure is considered to be the most important route of infection with EBOV in primates7, although there are reports suggesting or suspecting aerosol transmission of EBOV from NHP to NHP8, 9, 10, or in humans based on epidemiological observations11
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opinion/what-were-afraid-t... If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico. --Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota
Here's one example. Let's say there's a 16-year old girl and a 17-year old boy who are in a consensual dating relationship and, you know, take some racy photos of one other. The photos were taken consensually, not shared with anyone else, and stored only on their own computers/accounts. And let's say they're living in Florida and under state law, they're legally old enough to have sex with each other.
It would be fear-mongering to expect that these two happy teenagers would ever be prosecuted and convicted on "child pornography" charges, right? Except they were. And, as I wrote in 2007, a Florida appeals court upheld their criminal conviction: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-6157857.html
Yes, sorry, Timmy and Mark, sometimes a judge and jury will let it go that far. Sometimes they will "literally lock up your children..."
From my experience a key question to ask is: What would the eventual law say? Will it make it a federal felony to possess an encrypted phone? Or a federal felony to sell one?
The FBI endorsed H.R. 695 the last time around, which would have done the latter. Read it for yourself:
"Whoever, after January 31, 2000, sells in interstate or foreign commerce any encryption product that does not include features or functions permitting duly authorized persons immediate access to plaintext or immediate decryption capabilities shall be imprisoned for not more than 5 years, fined under this title, or both..."
"After January 31, 2000, it shall be unlawful for any person to manufacture for distribution, DISTRIBUTE, or import encryption products intended for sale or use in the United States, unless that product-- `(1) includes features or functions that provide an immediate access to plaintext capability... requiring any person in possession of decryption information to provide such information to a duly authorized investigative or law enforcement officer..." (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/T?&report=hr108p4&dbna...)
Note the distribution ban above. That would have hit open-source and free software projects.
Put another way, implementation details matter. A lot of voters might agree with the general proposition that law enforcement should have a way to snoop on terrorists|child pornographers|drug kingpins. They might not agree that a 14-year HN reader with a forked version of Android|AOSP on Github should go to prison for 20 years because he dared to distribute an unencrypted OS.
Swimming pools actually use less water per square foot than an irrigated lawn. About half, in fact. So lawns might be one answer to your question.
Remember 80% of California's water goes to agriculture. More water is used to grow almonds than for all of residential irrigation. There are far more non-farmers than farmers; I expect the next step will be to cut back more on agricultural uses.
In a few generations we may look back and wonder why we were flooding fields half a foot deep with increasing scarce water to grow rice in an extremely dry climate. Especially when rice grows perfectly well in areas of the world that actually, you know, get rain all year round.
If the allegations are true and there was no miscommunication, Uber violated its privacy policy and should be held accountable. Note I'm not calling for FTC action, but (again, if this is true) Uber's management owes me and other users an explanation, an apology, and a plan for privacy controls to ensure this doesn't happen again. Firing the person responsible would not be inappropriate. You can read the privacy policy yourself here: https://www.uber.com/legal/usa/privacy#3
It's also a little depressing. I've taken pains to try to get privacy "right" when working on http://recent.io/, including being extremely sensitive about location privacy, and examples like this (again, if true) will make folks less likely to trust apps in general. It's a shame because phone owners will assume that if you can't trust the billion-dollar lawyered-up companies to get privacy right, you surely can't trust the smaller ones. So it becomes safer not to install the apps in the first place. :(
Similarly, I care quite a bit what Marc A. thinks about VCs and startups and cash burn rates: he's a smart guy with lots of experience who is willing to speak his mind, a rare character trait nowadays. You can appreciate and even applaud that without endorsing his views on the possible legal fate of an ex-government contractor.
Cars die. I once had an old car, a Saab 900 SPG (160 hp!), which completely died when I was going at speed on I-78 in the left lane. Turns out it was the ECU. I managed to coast to the side of the highway without incident.
Most of the cars mentioned in this article are older ones, which would have more mechanical difficulties. Put another way, if you can buy a nice reliable 911 Turbo S to cart your groceries around in, you're probably not doing that with a subprime car loan.
To respond to your point more broadly, the ACLU has done excellent work on many Internet issues, and has represented me in court on multiple occasions. But it is not a monolithic entity, its board members do not always make the decisions you and I might prefer, and it does not always come down on the free speech side of an issue: http://www.volokh.com/2011/04/27/harvey-silverglate-on-the-a...
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/techs-surveillance-hop... "The Senate fled Washington last week without taking action on a bill to rein in the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection, a measure that topped the industry’s agenda after Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA’s expansive snooping programs..."
From today's announcement (scroll to "iCloud"): Mail and Notes are not stored in encrypted form on iCloud servers. http://www.apple.com/privacy/privacy-built-in/
From December 2013: Mail and Notes are not stored in encrypted form on iCloud servers. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4865
Yes, that's true. But if you run an email service that's based in Cupertino, what do you do when served with a lawful search warrant or wiretap order? Say "no," and be found in contempt of court and have all your servers carted away by some men in black so they can find the file they're looking for?
There are a few ways around this. One is not to permanently store warrant-worthy user data (Snapchat, Wickr, etc.). Another is end-to-end encryption (original version of Hushmail), though key distribution and UX become problems. A third is to move your servers to Switzerland, though then you get served with process from the Swiss authorities instead of FBIDHSDEAetc.
Apple has taken none of these steps. Assume our hypothetical Cupertino-based email service has not either. What do you do when the Feds show up with a lawful order?
Also note that today's announcement says Mail and Notes are "encrypted in transit" only. In other words the December 2013 page remains current.