goodplay

Especially when hardware makers make money off it. I'll need to replace my phone soon, and I'll make an effort to buy something that doesn't use broadcom.

Until they white-list websites, you know, for your safety. Good citizens only use government-approved and microsoft-approved sites anyways.

>All other methods still exist.

Still is the operative word.

When people complained about UEFI preventing people from running their OS of choice, Microsoft mandated that x86 OEMs make it possible for users to unlock their systems.

Fast forward to today, microsoft no longer mandates user control on x86-based systems.

It's a slippery slope I'd rather not ride.

If people are willing to accept restrictions on what can be obtained or sold on the store (falsely in that name of "safety"), what makes you think they wont accept restrictions on what websites they are allowed to load, or more likely, what website owners are allowed to host?

What about using latency or throughput as a signal? What about tunneling data over seemingly normal pictures taken by said camera app? What about switching the "User Available online" indicators at a seemingly natural rate? What about all three at the same time?

I assure you, steganography will always be possible. The only think a ban on encryption would do is hurt (badly) society, personal privacy, and those who want to follow the law.

Checking LE's stats page, they've issued over 30M certificates. 15k (hell, even 150k) certs used for nefarious purposes are nothing compared to the public good they're doing.

Also, LE did nothing wrong by issuing these certs (unlike a certain CA that issued bogus certs and will hopefully be kicked out of browsers soon): it's not a CA's role to dictate what a domain is used for.

How does does this counter my point?

I generally agree, but intelligence groups have to first find the signal they want to monitor. Modern steganography techniques coupled with the free randomness you get from the physical world gives you much to work with. And that's assuming common tech will be used.

Also, designing a secure general purpose messaging system is much harder that designing a system tailored for a specific use case.

Banning encryption by law is like demanding, loudly, that people not talk behind your back. Some will listen, and some will not. Only legitimate users and use cases will suffer.

tools designed to directly cause destruction are not similar to tools designed to provide privacy.

The thing is, banning encryption to fight terrorism makes as much difference as banning knifes to fight murder. Encryption is simple enough (in theory at least) and prevalent enough that banning it will only stop legitimate usage (e.g. personal privacy) without having any real impact on those who want to break the law. Modern steganography techniques make it easy for enterprising individuals to tunnel encrypted data over unencrypted channels; there is just too much randomness in the real world to exploit.

Regardless of what delusional politicians want, encryption is here to stay. It's just a matter of how much people are willing to give up to feel safe.

Want to hear something creepier? I was looking to buy a car a couple of years ago, and was checking out a bunch of car dealerships that were adjacent to each other. Shortly after I decided to return home (or perhaps as I started to leave the area, can't recall), I received a promotional SMS from my phone carrier about special car deals.

People forgot why privacy is important and why keeping records is very dangerous and shouldn't be carelessly, if at all, unless there is a genuine need for it.

Unfortunately, and I resent having to say this, I think humanity will need a new lesson before things can get better.

I Wonder how DRM anti-circumvention laws will mix with this; You have a locked-down device you use, depend on, and know is defective, but you are not allowed to hack the device to fix it.

This is my main gripe. You either have the evidence to put the defendant in jail or you don't. If you don't have enough evidence to support putting him in jail, you let him free.

Innocence until proven guilty. I don't want to live in a society where law is determined by emotions and personal bias, even if some criminals end up escaping justice.

Side note: I can't believe I feel the need to state this, but evidently it needs to be stated (from comments in this thread): these two drives where set up as part of a backup solution. They contain my personal data. They do not contain child pornography.

Guess the US government should do the same. You either play by the rules of the game, or don't play altogether.

Sitting directly in front of me are two moderately large encrypted hard drives the passwords for which I forgot. If I get a subpoena to produce their contents, I will potentially remain in jail of the rest of my life for the crime of being forgetful.

That judge's behavior and (the laws that enables it) is sickening. You either have enough evidence to convict a person, or you don't.

>Windows is tragic in many respects, but proprietary incentives did speed up computer development early on whereas GPL has slowed things down, and been sidelined, again and again.

The GPL is commonly cited as the reason why Linux is where it is today. It's a different incentive model to be sure, but one that undeniably works. It's why many prominent projects continue to use it, and it's why new projects use it as well. The only thing the GPL slowed down is people who aren't willing to accept how the GPL was designed to work.

Sure, I'd love a world where copyright was laughed off and where DMCA and anti-circumvention laws were annulled (i.e code is treated like the math that it is), but that's not the world we live in. In this reality, I and many others believe that the GPL provides the best trade-offs in terms freedom to users (and thus developers).

More often than not, building and deploying is secondary for developers to writing the library itself, if that. Build scripts and installation don't get the same treatment and care the library does.

The is one of the primary reasons why I prefer distribution-packaged libraries to pulling a library and its dependencies directly from developers. Staleness is a small price to pay relative to having at least two sets of eyes glance over the source and not execute arbitrary build scripts on my system.

By that logic, Windows (for example) should also be open-sourced, because people will write an open source equivalent from scratch. Writing an operating system from scratch is an unnecessary and tragic waste of resources.

So why not open source windows from the beginning and save billions, and a ton 'o precious programmer time?

How is this different from all the work being done to recreate open source versions of proprietary libraries?

Yeah, I agree. I also move to let sick people die if we can't verify that they have insurance coverage, and bar children from education if their parents can't pay (or if they are orphaned). I mean, screw poor people! Right?

You say this, but I've noticed "servalince-fetegue" on (surprisingly) non-tech people. I think the general populace are starting to wise up to what is happening; perhaps not on a large enough scale to effect anything, but it's happening nonetheless.

I think the future might not be as bleak as it currently seems. Talk with people. Explain what's going on and why it's bad. Despite the common rhetoric of people not caring, many do.

Nah, the owner wants to block scrappers.

If a taxi company keeps getting screwed over by patrons of a given restaurant, the company should stop providing service for said patrons, seek compensation directly from the people who require their service (the restaurant), or seek legal action against either the patrons or the restaurant.

Demanding otherwise is just naive.

I disagree that it is stealing because I never agreed (or wanted) to participate in this program. The site owner did.

I'm under no obligation (moral or otherwise) to make honest contributions. If we wanted to continue with your analogy, it'll be like being forced into a taxi, then driven one meter, then forced to pay a large fee because the landlord doesn't want me to walk on his lawn. I didn't choose to ride the taxi. The landlord did (ignoring saner options).

If google wants a revenue from their service, they should consider charging site owners.

If google wants to train their NNs, they'll have to pay people to classify data for them.

If google doesn't want to do either, and doesn't want people like me contributing to their system, don't let site owners allow us to use their site.

Otherwise, I think google should shutdown the service.

No, I do not believe it is okay to take physical goods or receive services with no payment. I do however believe that people should be free to send and receive any information they wish, regardless of the wishes of the "owner" of said information. Sharing information without the right holder's involvement will not make them loose access to it.

If you, as a site owner, don't want people to share information your server sent to their computers, implement strong DRM or don't allow off-premise access altogether. You might loose many prospective users, but at least your information will remain "safe". Probably.

If you want to share information on a website but can't think of a reasonable way to make money of it, that's your problem, not mine.

Lastly, I fail to see how a discussion on copyright relates to recaptchas or even site-owners' failed business models. Unless you can get this thread back on topic, perhaps we should continue this (most likely frutless) discussion somewhere else.

Their competence in restricting access to the information and preventing its decimation, I suppose.

Neither the host or google ask for money in exchange for their services. The profitability of their chosen business model is not my concern.

If they want something in return, perhaps they should consider setting up a paywall.

I actually feed google false information (select rectangular objects when asked to select traffic signs, flat surfaces when asked for water surfaces, and so on). It'll probably be filtered out when aggregated with other users, but I like to think that I'm at least influencing it even if a little.

I wouldn't have a problem if they'd open the data set, but I'm not exactly keen on being forced to work for free.

For now.

AMP is a PROXY/MITM service, with all the perks that come from being such a service. There is nothing stopping google ,or whatever company owns them after they become a Yahoo!, from changing their "policy" to better be aligned with their interests.

Is there a recording of this discussion available online?

What guarantees do we have that the evidence has not been fabricated or planted? Evidence collection processes exists to minimize misconduct. If someone can't explain how the evidence has been obtained, they should be viewed as suspect.