1,169 karma · joined July 27, 2010
Hi, my name is Tim Sally. I'm a programmer, security researcher, and Lisp hacker. Also an unabashed fan of theoretical Computer Science (join us at: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/). :-p Graduating this year with a BSc in CS from UIUC.
Advice: Most people who fail in graduate school fail because they never experienced research before graduate school. Consider whether it's a good idea to take funding before ever building or selling a product.
Elsewhere: ----------
Web: http://stack.io.
Email: 'poet' at the above domain.
Code: http://github.com/poet/.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/__poet__.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tsally.
I will point out that there is nothing wrong with that. Google is not for those with strong privacy requirements, just as all popular operating systems are not for those with strong security requirements. Google falls at one point on the privacy/usability continuum and DDG falls at another point. But as far as the article being unfair to Google goes, I'll have to disagree. You are identifiable with Google's data and that's a reality.
"[Congress shall have the power] to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Further, from Fox Film v. Doyal (again, emphasis mine):
"The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors."
Copyright terms come down to a simple metric: if the public would benefit more from a work being in the public domain, the work shouldn't be copyright (insofar that the progress of science and innovation is not stifled). Corporations and anyone making a living off intellectual property have nothing to do with it; copyright exist only for the benefit of the general public. And with some of the most innovative systems software of the last decade being developed for free, you're going to have a hard time arguing that such lengthy copyright terms are needed to ensure that innovation happens. Linux is billion dollar project that happened organically; I just don't buy it that ~100 year copyright terms are necessary.
> Unix was designed from the start to run multi-user environments, whereas Windows grew out of DOS, which was initially built for single-user, non-networked environments. The difference in their initial goals led to wildly different security models.
No. [1, Section 2.2]
> The average Unix user runs without superuser privileges most of the time. Typically, the less experienced a user is, the less privileges he has in a Unix environment.
No. The most popular Linux distribution lets you run any command as any user by default. [2, Default Sudoers File]
> Windows has an inversion of privileges compared to Unix. That is, the most experienced users grant their daily account the fewest privileges, whereas the least experienced users operate with administrator privileges.
No. This isn't the case with the Windows that is shipping today.
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One final thing to consider. Who cares about separation of privileges if your OS is full of privilege escalation exploits? Hint: one of these operating systems spent billions of dollars hardening their OS and the other is full of holes.
[1] http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research/technical_reports/1991/TR%...
The government also has a vested intrest that the cryptography used by itself and its citizens be reasonably secure, else industrial espionage and other similar activities become trivial. Note that the NSA approved AES for the protection of Top Secret information. If you want to argue the NSA deliberately let the majority of classified information in the United States be protected by a flawed algorithm you're going to have to provide some proof.
How is it not available? There are plenty of people who design and analyze stego. There's your expertise.
The people that are good at building and designing crypto and stego (Are there any good stego systems? Doubt it.) systems are outside the paygrade of most companies, nevermind activists. The expertise is not available.
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Your arguments are disconnected from reality and don't really have any particularly notable knowledge of this domain. This conversation has been a net loss, and judging by your average of ~2 karma per comment, other people seem to agree. I'll let you have the last word if you'd like it, but please refrain from wasting so much space in the future.
curl -s http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS | grep gov
E: becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
E: snyder@fnald0.fnal.gov
curl -s http://gcc.gnu.org/viewcvs/trunk/MAINTAINERS?view=co | grep gov
Asher Langton langton2@llnl.gov
We're not talking about users, we're talking about attackers and developers. Why would users have anything to do with our discussion?
Plenty of cryptography is also designed by individuals not in the service of any nation state (as far as we know, anyway). In fact, some argue that such encryption is more trustworthy than encryption developed by nation states themselves.
Developed by academics, but tested by both academics and the government. The testing is the thing that's actually important.
I can't speak for any and all activists. It's really up to them to acquire such expertise or get advice from people who have such expertise.
The point is that the technical expertise is not available. It's not up to them. It's not available. What you suggest they do is not possible.
That said, the problem here is no different from figuring out which encryption to use. So your criticism applies equally to encryption as it does to steganography.
Nope. Get back to me when we get government backed standards and recommendations for anonymity (hint: we have them for crypto).
Also, what makes you think activists have the technical expertise available to know what the "most secure techniques available" are and what methods have been broken?
Two basic claims: Tor is tainted because (1) the concepts the software is based on were developed with partial funding from the military and (2) Zed thinks one of the committers is untrustworthy. Guess what? That describes a huge amount of software, including Mac OS X and Firefox. God damn Zed, this Hitler sandwich shit is pretty weak.
Zed also has a problem with Tor because he thinks there is a "gigantic percentage of hackers and security experts on the volunteer payroll of a group who's job is to illegally wiretap people and circumvent the law on behalf of the government". He thinks some of these people work on Tor and thus Tor is untrustworthy. Funny though, his ISP is likely guilty of the same thing. I wonder if Zed takes that into account as a part of his paranoid fantasy.
There are serious problems with using Tor and Zed fails to mention any of them. You'll want to read what Thomas has to say on the subject (http://searchyc.com/tptacek). Specifically, Thomas mentions that a general problem with tools like Tor is that it identifies your traffic as a subset of all traffic thats probably worth monitoring. You're essentially adding bright red neon signs to your most sensitive traffic. The amount of traffic going through the Tor network is small enough that it is a tractable problem for a nation state to attempt to monitor all of it. Thomas also goes into how the incentive structure for these tools is completely broken. The defenders are academic researchers going for tenure, the attackers are nation states with millions of dollars to spend, and the users are dissidents that get killed when the tool fails. Unfortunately, arguments with this level of nuance appear to escape Zed in this case. I fear he doesn't have the domain knowledge to write something intelligent about this issue.
(Note, no training as a lawyer. Just interested in the law.)
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-vict...
[2] https://www.eff.org/files/warshak_opinion_121410.pdf
Your partisanism and preconceived notations are blinding you in this case, and I will say, it makes a conversation with you quite unenjoyable.
1.) Agreed.
2.) Agreed.
3.) Agreed.
4.) Strongly agreed.
5.) Disagree. Marriage is not a governmental institution and needs to be removed from our legislation and legal code in favor of civil unions.
6.) Strongly disagree. Sorry, how did he "let" that happen? Obama doesn't control Congress. He got the hard work done by, I don't know, negotiating with the Russia and writing the damn thing?!
7.) Agreed.
8.) I recognize what you're saying here, but to not support what Obama has done on DADT based on this feels like a stretch.
I'm not saying Obama has accomplished everything (my comment actually says the opposite and expresses displeasure in some parts of the job he has done). But do note that I was responding to someone who thought Obama was 100% rhetoric and no backbone, which empirically is not true. Also, I hope you realize that young people have thought the nation would be taken over by "young progressives for a more enlightened country" since the begininning of this nation. You do realize the people in power now grew up in the 60s, perhaps one of the most left-leaning decades this nation has seen?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Defe...
As for (8), how is that Obama's fault? He got the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on board, he called for the removal during the State of the Union (note that the SotU is probably one of if not the most watched speech in the world), and then pressured Congress to take action. The difficulty comes from the Legislative Branch, which, thanks to the separation of powers, Obama has no control over.
Also, how is the Nobel Obama's fault? He knew he didn't deserve it (hint: read between the lines of his acceptance speech). The idiotic committee put him in that situation and I don't think you'll hear anyone arguing it was actually deserved.
Do you really expect people to engage in a conversation with you when you demonstrate such a clear lack of preparation and knowledge of the issues in question? It's a drain for all those involved. Dijkstra had something to say about this....
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gates#Fiscal_restraint
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870431490457525...
[3] http://www.whitehouse.gov/VoluntaryDisclosure
[4] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-memo...
[5] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/promise/427...
[6] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/09/07/27/ClosingLobbyistL...
[7] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/promise/420...
0.) Cut taxes for 95% of America (EDIT: not referring to the most recent tax legislation... these are tax cuts Obama passed a while ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/politics/19taxes.html. They truly are the tax cuts no one has heard of....).
1.) Reserved the policy of forbidding the media to photograph fallen soldiers and reversed Bush's torture policy.
2.) Signed legislation that provided health insurance to 4 million uninsured children.
3.) Prevented insurance companies from denying claims due to pre-existing conditions.
4.) Significantly expanded Pell grants.
5.) Expanded hate crime legislation to include sexual orientation and extended benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees.
6.) Created the largest and most significant nonproliferation treaty with Russia in our lifetime.
7.) Credit card reform to stop abusive practices.
8.) Ended don't ask, don't tell.
Here's a fairly complete list with references: http://obamaachievements.org/list.
Note: I'm not pleased with the mapping between Obama's rhetoric and reality either. But you too are guilty of unsubstantiated rhetoric.
What? You're misinformed. Adams didn't believe that for one. A quote from the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the Senate in 1797 and signed by John Adams: "The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion." The vote was unanimous, there was no public dissent, and Adams had the following to say about the treaty (emphasis mine): "I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof."
I'm not trying to argue that Christian principles aren't present in our history (they are). But you're regurgitating a common talking point in an attempt to rewrite history.
It was republished in a collection of essays in 1971, so imagine it's still under copyright. Hrm.... I'll take a look at what the collection says when I get home.