HN user
There's a big difference between "a little impedance" and "risks human life". War waged with robots will still cost money.
If politicians make bad decisions, perhaps you should try fixing that instead of sacrificing the lives of young men for a small chance of making those decisions more painful.
A lot of people make stupid cases. Should giving birth be dangerous so that people are reluctant to have unwanted children? Should sending email be dangerous so that people receive less viagra spam?
Of course there is. Every modern iPhone has a unique ID and its own private key.
When that happens, sure, let's be happy. Until then, forgive us for not having an aligned interest in giant corporations being above the law.
The only frightening part of your story is the insecurity of the human experts.
Sure, in theory, 1password MIGHT have better private auditing and review. But there's no reason to believe they do. To the contrary, when asked about open sourcing 1password, one of their developers explained that they don't do formal code review because it's too expensive, and that none of the external experts they consulted with have ever performed a full review.
https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/22686/open-sour...
Wants mean little. I want to marry Taylor Swift.
Firstly, I said "perhaps deliberately, perhaps not" because I am not claiming that they intentionally wanted to provide security theater. I don't think that motive is relevant. I'm replying to a specific statement to explain that there is a benefit, even though it is intangible. Of course there are other bad effects, like inconvenience to travellers, and other good effects, like providing stable jobs to otherwise unemployably stupid Americans who live in or near airport-bearing cities.
In retrospect, I should have mentioned that last bit instead as a tangible benefit, but I only just now thought of it.
Why value tangible benefits over intangible ones?
Calling it an illusion implies that air travel is not safe, when in fact it is very safe. However, people did not feel safe, so the government constructed an agency (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not) to provide security theater and help people feel safe.
In general, American citizens today are safe from terrorism. If anything, the greatest danger comes not from terrorists themselves but from the American peoples' unjustified fear of terrorism. We could use some more security theater.
I find it unlikely that consumers are as safety conscious as you imagine them to be. Think about how many people currently text or do other things to distract themselves while driving. They willingly choose less safety in order to be able to do something else while in transit. Pushing this behavior to its natural conclusion is what will allow self driving cars to be accepted even if they are 10% less safe than normal drivers.
Even if they had similar access, a leak is still dangerous because it allows them to behave as if they have the information without divulging as much about their own capabilities.
In my experience, the people who work with technology do the same, just with different sound bites.
That feeling is warranted. Relative to the US, Bolivia is impotent.
What does that have to do with what I said? Why do you think I mentioned life insurance?
Why not? They are in some countries, like Finland. It seems to work OK.
No matter how much social security is, some people will manage to spend so extravagantly that it is not enough. An anecdote of one such person is not very convincing.
For most of us with dependents, that's what private life insurance is for. The social safety net is for people too poor or irresponsible to have life insurance.
Search google for something like "microsoft tech support phone number"?
Remittite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Hopefully it sounds like exactly what I said it was in the first sentence. The only part I could reasonably see as being called "speculative" is the second sentence of the first item, which is clearly marked as an inference.
Which part of that comment was an unsupported assertion? The "assertion" that documents leaked in 2013 are now several years old? The "assertion" that not every single capability the NSA has ever developed is now public knowledge?
What Snowden leaked is a lower bound on the NSA's capabilities, not an upper one. And even in the "best" case, where he and the journalists involved exercised no discretion about what he leaked and no data was classified beyond even his access, that data is now several years old.
In the house analogy, it's less of a backdoor and more like just walking through the wall.
Any proof would obviously be classified. But there is a lot of circumstantial evidence.
1. He made the statement in the OP. That implies that normal people using modern encryption does not impose a significant barrier to the NSA doing their jobs. Contrast with the 90s when the NSA pushed for the clipper chip, presumably because they couldn't eavesdrop effectively otherwise.
2. The NSA uses its own secret suite A algorithms for things they really care about keeping secret, not the suite B algorithms like AES that they recommend for the rest of us through NIST.
For most searches the average person does - aka I want to go to the wikipedia page or official site for X - the results are indistinguishable.
Is Raymond Chen management? He's certainly one of the more respected Microsofters I know of.
An Indian- or Chinese-American can attain "no longer considered minority" (aka whiteness)
Is this something white people actually believe?
Successful minorities don't become white. They become weapons white people wield against less successful minorities.
If it wasn't clear, that was only one example. People in general do not pay for things like Consumer Reports.
And Consumer Reports reaches about 7 million US households. Out of over 110 million. That's quite the definition of "most" you've got there.
There's been plenty of reporting about the propensity towards terrorism in engineers specifically. Did you have a specific question, or do you just refuse to do your own research?