MCRed

Could the selection of primes derived from Pi be optimized to find weaker ones vs. stronger ones? eg: calculate a very large set of them and then pick the ones that are weakest and then publish that as a standard (of course you wouldn't let on that you had chosen the weakest, you could pick an arbitrary function that gets you the weak ones which would then look really good because pi is objective and that function is objective.)

Does anyone know where one can get a free wildcard certificate? Need it for development and foo/bar/baz/biff.example.com change names regularly (they include the hash of the code commit) so I would like to get a *.dev.example.com wildcard cert. (one that won't give warnings that scare the business types who are testing the code, and won't understand what self-signed means.)

The iPhone has never prevented you from running your own code on it. It shipped with a javascript SDK and then within the year they opened it up to objective-c programs. They charge you $99 a year for the certificate signing service, but it's really no big deal... if you can afford an iPhone you can afford $99 a year. (Hell, I think these days you don't even need to be a paid developer, the free developers can run their code on their phones.)

10k distinct combinations-- if, and only iff, they used a 7 digit all numeric pin. The odds of this are not bad for most people, but in this case the person who had this phone has shown better than the average criminals level of OpSec.

One thing is for sure- for phones with TouchID where you only need to enter the pin on reboot, it makes sense to make the pin something other than numeric and longer than 4 digits.

Does anyone really believe he can do it? Is anyone taking him seriously?

I see this as a campaign stunt for the LP nod. But for me, it only confirms that Gary Johnson is the right choice. McAfee isn't exactly striking a resonant chord for liberty here. He's coming off like a braggart.

I wish the FBI would give him a shot at the data- cause I'd like to see him eat a shoe on live TV, or STFU and go into hiding if he doesn't have the guts to eat the shoe.

Cause I don't think for a second he can break AES.

Lets see, english major up to her ears in debt, moves to San Francisco for a CSR job?

I think we need to up the math requirements for english degrees.

Alas you can't teach common sense.

I would be a lot more sympathetic if I weren't constantly being bombarded by BernieBros insisting we need "Free" college educations and all kinds of other handouts.

Sorry, I grew up poor, I didn't get lucky, I worked hard. I made my own luck.

She made her own bed, and then set it on fire.

The phone in question was a work phone, not a personal phone. In work environments the enterprise IT tools control how the phone is administered, backed up, and the like. Which means that the company that issued the phone most likely had the key to unlock the backups.

Title changes are purely to comply with 80 character limit, otherwise as close to the original articles' title.

Transplant yourself to any other police state. Anywhere with a very strong government hell bent on controlling its citizens. Eastern Germany, Or the USSR, or Germany under the Nazis.

How did the government get such power? Immediately via overthrow, or incrementally?

At what point do you draw the line? Has there ever been a government that got some power and then stopped trying to get more? Look at the history of the USA for the past 200 years.

Apple is trying to draw a line in the sand. We can debate about where the line should be, but there has to be a line.

I'm not sure which "other side" you're targeting with your argument, but as a gun rights advocate its' completely consistent to be a privacy rights advocate-- and basically a human rights advocate.

That it doesn't hurt another, do what thou wilt. Thus gay married farmers should be able to defend their marijuana crops with fully auto AK47s. Marijuana, guns and gay sex don't do bad things to society. Only people can misuse them.

We don't need to have a discussion. As you point out we already had it.

It doesn't matter. We want privacy, we believe we have human rights.

They don't care. They want power. That's what this all boils down to.

They want power. And they are going to keep trying until they get it, just as they have taken over so much already.

Also, the court isn't asking, its' demanding, and its demanding Apple create a vulnerability in a system designed to thwart such vulnerabilities. I'm not sure it's even possible.

What if Apple didn't fight this yet failed to create a working vulnerability? After all the phone has protections against its firmware being replaced without the passcode!

IF Apple were to fail would they be held in contempt of court?

This is why I have contempt for our courts-- way too many judges who are never punished for their tyranny.

You don't see them going after servers, because the servers are far more vulnerable.

My Facebook feed is full of people ragging on Trump for being on the wrong side of this issue, but they are silent about Obama:

"In a secret meeting convened by the White House around Thanksgiving, senior national security officials ordered agencies across the U.S. government to find ways to counter encryption software and gain access to the most heavily protected user data on the most secure consumer devices, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the marquee product of one of America’s most valuable companies, according to two people familiar with the decision."

This ruling didn't make corporations people, it gave groups of people the right to exercise the free speech rights they already had, even when they choose to pool their money to buy the media on which they wish to express themselves.

First off, depends on how you use the word "regulate".

But the government has done a poor job of regulating money, and well, to be honest, money is really the result of our efforts / labors, and thus yeah, the government should not be regulating it, generally.

If you discover a problem with a product, you either don't release it or you fix it. You don't need to tell others (and others don't have a right) what you've discovered.

To think otherwise is to think that my invention that I have locked up in my head that would benefit society (according to you) is something you have the right to force me to disclose.

Privacy exists for reasons and is a basic human right.

EG: do those who think you should have to disclose everything you know have pins on their phones? Think Apple shouldn't be encrypting phone data?

That's not broken.

Brand new software that-- and this seems to be missed in the wider discussion-- may be impossible to produce. It may not be possibly for Apple to comply. For instance, you can't install firmware on a locked phone.

Also, the FCC should not be able to make rules like this. This is why we have a three branch system. Congress doesn't have the legal power, in the constitution, to give agencies the power to make laws (Even if they call them "Rules")

Increasingly over time these rules are becoming more and more draconian and including things that most people oppose.

For instance, there was an outcry about CISPA and COPA that killed those bills... so the FCC made an 800 page ruling on "net neutrality" and people accepted it, because they wanted net neutrality. (And who has time to read 800 pages?)

The proper, legal way to transport a firearm while flying is in the bag.

Last time I did it (this was before 2001 and the police state hysteria we're in now) all that you had to do was get a little sticker for the bags handle at the check in counter (they asked us to show that the gun was unloaded.)

Not even a big deal.

There is no history of guns leaping up, loading themselves and killing people.

Do you realize it is perfectly legal to transport a firearm in your luggage?

You just check it at the counter, and they usually put a flag on the case to indicate it has been cleared (to make sure it's unloaded.)

I wonder how many of these are simply pieces where the flag was ripped off via the luggage transport system.

For those olde enough to remember, this is very much what things were like in the USSR.

I remember not 10 years ago a liberal friend of mine (With a Masters in economics!) supporting Chavez and complaining about Obama not supporting Venezuela.

This is not a liberal paradise.

To be honest, I'm at a loss for why articles from this publication, and other similar ones whose primary output is.. spin and politics... are on the front page here.

Not news, not for hackers, not tech, not startups.

This article is purely about trying to perpetuate class warfare.

No better proof of the intellectual bankruptcy than the left can be found in the constant bashing of Ayn Rand -- and the companion ignoring of her philosophy - Objectivism. Or the book Atlas Shrugged, which is a 1,000 page logical argument of all the different ways that leftism is evil.

The left can't stand the risk of people actually reading the book before metaphorically burning it, and so they bash Rand and ignore Objectivism.

The reality is, if you read Atlas Shrugged, and you're a thinking being, you will no longer be a leftist afterwards.

Alas, now the Left wants to silence any dissent- calling it "hate speech" and on this site, literally making people who think independently invisible (if they aren't hellbanned.)

What a shame. What happened to tolerance? What happened to embracing facts, logic and reason?

And my understanding is that everything after the 5C is less vulnerable to even this attack (Which itself may not be possible, even with a firmware update.)

No, they state clearly that this is what the court ordered them to do. That doesn't mean it is possible. The court doesn't care whether something is possible or not.

Quantum was the premiere maker of SCSI drives back in the day. They were beating IBM and IBM needed more capacity so IBM bought them. Then IBM sold to Hitachi, who sold the drive business to Western Digital who sold the drive business to Toshiba.

I believe these Deskstar types and derivatives are the same essential mechanism and processes as those old quantum drives (probably especially in terms of the QA processes). The heads and the technology have improved to give better capacity of course, but I've been buying and relying on these drives for ~25 years at this point.

I'm not surprised to see them showing up well on these charts.

As an anarchs-capitalist I'd be happy to have a society where anarchs-communists had their communes and lived under their own rules.

This may seem off topic but its directly relevant- we regularly have these debates in the anarchist community.

But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. (Yes, the irony is lost on them.)

For people who are conditioned to believe it-- the others must be forced to live the way they think is appropriate--otherwise things are not "Fair".

Jealousy, fear, all these emotions are easily manipulated by propaganda.

To the detriment of tolerance.

So, while I want to see gay married couples defending their marijuana crops with fully auto machine guns, and saying whatever they want online, because I believe in human rights, I must admit I am surrounded by two groups of people who do not believe in human rights and are increasingly seeing the other group as less than human.

This will not end well.

"To leave that metaphor, let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined. It doesn’t matter whether they think they’re defending women, men, transgender people, Muslims, humanists … the ghastliness is absolutely the same. It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view. I’ve heard people shriek their secularism in such a way as to make me want instantly to become an evangelical Christian."

This is a fair description of how Stephen Fry (as much as I love him) acted towards me on Twitter several years ago. (about the time I left twitter for good)

I don't think he's a bad guy, I think there is just an authoritarian streak running thru out culture right now that is so strong that a guy who, at the time, had just played a persecuted gay man in V for Vendetta was advocating for the persecution of people he didn't like! (though I'm sure he didn't realize it/recognize it/intend it.)

I think Stephen is a well intentioned guy who doesn't intend to piss in the pool, but I think propaganda has scared and manipulated him, as it has done so many others over history.