Posts by Catfitz

Hell desk to user: 'I know you're wrong. I wrote the software. And the protocol it runs on'

Re: Possible or easy?

Thank you. Always an everywhere, especially on open source software but it can be on commercial software, the coder has zero interest in the user, even the power user, even the user who is his cohort and also a programmer. And so he cares not about documentation or customer requirements, they don't exist in his universe.

A good example is the way that Windows can't delete your photos after you check the box to delete your photos when downloading them from your iphone. Zillions of forums and help desks tackle this all different ways, some with wildly complicated solutions, but Microsoft can't be bothered to make this happen normally.

Ugh. I saw what you did there. The point of this story is to reinforce the idea that women programmers are lesser beings than males, and reinforce the Google guy's memo. Fail.

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

Silva is absolutely right. And this argument that "the bad guys will get it" is totally inane, given that the bad guys *already* have the crypto, duh. Lock your stuff up better and it won't be stolen. Isn't that what you nerds always tell the victims of hacks? Well, same to you.

There be dragons? Why net neutrality groups won't go to Congress

Re: Congressional inaction was whole reason the FCC went the Title II route

1) Can you point to any actual cases of when any of these things have been done?

2) But...why can't they pertain? The way everything else works is you pay more for more usage.

No, it's not fear -- unless you mean the deep-seated fear of legitimate democracy by anarchists. It's deliberate. These cadres who try to force change by imposing socialism through flash-mobbing one government agency know that their arguments won't stand the test of Congressional review. I agree that anything related to the Internet and scarce resources on it like broadband should be decided by law, not agency regulation, especially not by big bundlers for Obama being appointed to the FCC, which is how you got those rules -- and why they were easily undone.

But you're not going to like the result if you are for socialist uravnilovka (levelling) that "net neutrality" mandates. In fact, the nay-sayers don't have a case and can't really point to any actual blockage or slowing. Comcast has developed a whole line of rhetoric around this point. You can't force us tax-payers to pay for Google the Ad Agency's last mile. So what law results is not one that is going to serve Google and its lobbyists but be balanced among their interests and their legitimate and natural enemies, the telcos. That's democracy. Compromise. If we pay higher bills for the use of more electricity, the same may have to apply to broadband. Just because Google needs to sell ads on bandwidth-eating YouTube means that we all have to pay the price. You like socialism? Admit that the Internet has to be for everyone, not just Google.

Paris, jihadis, tech giants ... What is David Cameron's speechwriter banging on about now?

Math is Political

This discussion follows the same boring and frustrating groove of every other tech thug talk on encryption, with the same boring tech thug talking points -- and I thought The Register is better than that -- I thought The Register would be at least as critical of encryption mania as it is of copyleftism. Sadly, it's not.

What's not only frustrating but in fact deadly, given the terrorists and Telegram, is this invocation of math as a sacred force that only high priests can handle -- I've even heard a crypto-anarchist say "mathematics makes the state obsolete" -- yet in the next sentence claiming that the math is in fact flawed, filled with holes, not all that, so that we need to be so upset about maximum encryption. Well, which is it, guys?

We're supposed to accept the totalitarian proposition -- and no, it's not like gravity because it is in the hands of humans and that means politics -- that we "can't" do anything about "math" and that if a system generates random numbers to make encruption and that obviously can't be easily cracked or cracked at all, we must throw up our hands. What happened to the claim by the Snowdenistas that the NSA "weakened" encryptions? Building "back doors" is a political decision and one Silicon Valley's titans didn't take because they want to make sure they keep their street cred and fight The Man. Meanwhile, a new version of CISPA quietly passes anyway.

The tech thugs who invoke "math" all the time aren't thinking through the consequences of their totalitarian proposition, whatever its "science" -- that law-enforcers are therefore likely to become more brutish and use more physical methods of coercion which is why your friend -- and I say your friend because you invoke "math" like he does as a weapon -- Julian Assange built RubberHose -- which was taken away from him as classified by the NSA, prompting him to wage hacker jihad on the USG ever since. The consequence of more "math" are more racial profiling, more intrusiveness, less permission for travel, more kinds of other surveillance. And that's how you -- and Bruce Schneier -- want to leave it -- you get to be in the 21st century, the police have to be in the 19th.

And any time anyone, especially a woman raises the slightest critique of this thug-world, you can only disparage them as stupid, not getting "the math" and pursuing an agenda by some evil force.

The government, of course, can make the same efforts to regulate as it did Clipper Chip and PGP and fail because of the connivings of the crypto set, then double back and become more deadly in other ways -- and as you say, your math is weak in places. Of course, there's another path whereby tech companies secure general privacy and don't cave to governments lightly without a warrant, but under which they cooperate on the basics; after all, the user can't encrypt the view of his actual form of payment and ID from the company providing the service, right guys? They have to see it to serve him.

Perhaps they will have to adapt a willingness to not encrypt the metadata of geographical places. Once you open up a free debate without the hobbling of disparagement over your perception of math, some solution might become visible -- never the 99/1 that the binary geek mind insists on, but good enough.

Telegram was made by a Russian who fled Putin's persecution (supposedly) and who doesn't care if his product is used by terrorists (Bazarov, call your office). Putin isn't bombing ISIS but propping up Assad. This is all science, not math. It matters who the humans are who establish the "math" institutions and how accountable they are to the public.

Maybe it will turn out that like the lead in the Romans' cups, encryption will be the thing that killed the arrogant tech class who thought they would usher humanity in the future.

The million-dollar hole in the FBI 'paying CMU to crack Tor' story

Thank God for El Reg or I wouldn't ever know half of the evil that goes on in the software cults of Silicon Valley.

First of all, there's a principle of academic freedom, and even any kind of freedom of speech in the US, which enables any researcher or member of the public to criticize software, you know? Especially software paid for by the Department of Defense. Yes, this is a fact you can find on the Tor website -- the overwhelming majority of their funds come from DoD; the rest come from DRL (State Department on Democracy, Human Rights and Labor) and other private donors all listed. It was developed by the Navy. It is paid for by the DoD. Yet it is run by crypto anarchists, including Snowden's chief helper Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks rep in North America who fled to Germany one step of the WikiLeaks grand jury.

So please, let's not be children here. This is a faction fight in the military industrial complex where long-haired hippies like that man named Julian who once got a grant from the NSA (yes, that Julian Assange, and yes that NSA) to work on his "Rubber Hose" program and when he was classified out of his own software later, rebelled like the Free Software nerd and has waged jihad on his former paymasters ever since.

The Navy *itself* has posted scholarly research showing that the chief developer *himself* who is also on the board of Tor found that most users could be de-anonymized given a month or so and many faster. Not to mention that the mere fact of usage of Tor stands out like a sore thumb not only for authoritarians like Russia who use the real rubber hoses then, but Harvard which easily found an idiot who emailed a bomb scare using Tor.

Dingledine is not a journalist and not merely some non-profit do-gooder with government funding. He's the leader of a crypto-anarchist cell that openly calls on their colleagues to "go in and get the ball and bring it out," as Jacob Appelbaum put it at the aptly named Chaos Computer Club, egging Snowden *whom they had already met in 2012* and others to savage the NSA. You may be fine with that, but this isn't democracy, isn't liberal, and isn't desirable as a form of government. It leads to terrorism such as we had in Paris.

WHY can't Silicon Valley create breakable non-breakable encryption, cry US politicians

I guess you never read this?

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/encryption-techniques-and-the-access-they-give/1665/

Of course it's possible. The two people you've interviewed here don't think it is because they don't *want* any government capacity for access to digital communications and devices. They are activists -- of course they think that.

You need to ask more adults about this who have a greater understanding about the need for cooperation with law enforcement.

Oh, come now. El Reg needs to talk to more experts than these two cadres who are operatives in the crypto-anarchist movement. Obviously *they* will tell you that it is "impossible" -- just like for years these same people told us that it was "impossible" to digitally protect copyright because anything can be copied or cracked -- and yet now tell us there is invincible code that can't allow law-enforcers *even with a warrant* to enter.

There's something deeply criminal and sinister here and I would expect El Reg, with its long and illustrious history of crying foul on all the copyleftist nonsense coming out of Silicon Valley, to cry foul on crypto-anarchy.

There are all kinds of ways this can be done starting with the obvious, the skeleton key that works on all phones which the hysterics keep telling us "can't" be done because Russians or Chinese or Al Qaeda will hack it.

That's funny, you said nothing could crack this code, and yet if you lock up the skeleton key really well, that can be hacked because...Internet. But we all live in an environment of massive hacking and people devise all kinds of systems every day, organic and mechanic, to cope to deter and at least mitigate the situation if not cure it.

The same approach can be taken to the skeleton key protection. Make a skeleton key that allows for changing or obfuscation or a range that hackers can't figure out, or a pattern they can't figure out.

Then there's two-factor keys that have been discussed which we're always told is "hard." Well, allowing criminals to roam free is hard, too, so work on it.

We're told by young Matt Apuzzo that in fact the feds can wiretap real-time phone calls. Oh? So if they can do that, why can't they also get into this black closed box?

The cryptos were allowed to win the first two rounds of the crypto wars -- Clipper Chip and PGP. They can't be allowed to win this one or we will live under the tyranny of anarchy -- which we increasingly do anyway because of Manning, Snowden, Anonymous, etc.

And they don't to win it in order for all of us to have privacy but with some capacity for law-enforcement in a democratic society to be able to control crime. Otherwise, we are handing over the Internet and all things digital -- and here comes the Internet of Things -- to people who under cover of privacy rights instigate crime, terrorism, and anarchy to destroy states. I'm serious.

Copyright trolls, biz scum, freetards - it's NOT black and white

Believable Right Up Until Creative Commons, Then Not

I'm very skeptical. I don't know the people, and I don't think Mitch Kapor or one of his front groups are lurking behind this, but they might be -- it's in California.

I was thinking that at last, a solid alternative to the copyleftist Electronic Frontier Foundation had finally appeared, and I was with you almost half-way through the article, but as soon as they started praising Creative Commons, I knew that they had to have the Google business model agenda underneath somewhere.

You asked who funds their project, and they say individual donations, but you should get a list, and also find out who funds the University itself. Even without the technocommunist funding, however, they could simply be ideologically likeminded.

If they were truly serious about helping the little guy, they'd ditch Creative Commons in a heartbeat. It provides no option to "click and pay me if you want to use a copy," and that's its deepest flaw. They should not be in the business of abetting those who browbeat people to "share" instead of getting paid.

I'll want to look very closely at the list of cases, and see if they help Second Life designers.

CISPA passes House of Representatives vote

So How Much is the EFF Spending?

Why are you insinuating that receiving $100,000 from companies interested in this bill is some kind of great evil?! It's absolutely legal to receive funds from lobbyists and corporations, and the reason you know about them is because...they are registered and visible. There isn't any "secret" about this as it has to be reported.

Why don't you ask the same kind of questions about the money sloshing around on all those opposing the bill?! Start with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mitch Kapor, and see where the money comes from for their campaigns (among the donors are George Soros' Foundation).

And keep going to see what Google is spending on this despite quietly staying out of the fray for now because they want to keep their powder dry for the final fight in the Senate, and they don't want to go up against Facebook needlessly until they have to. Facebook supports the bill. Good!

This time, the legions of mindless script kiddies likely won't win, as the adults have finally figured out that they have to maintain the rule of law over the unruly Internet for the sake of everyone's freedoms, not just the freedom and wealth of Big IT.

Vint Cerf: 'The internet is not a human right'

Cerf is right for the wrong reasons

There isn't any "we the people of the world". Where? You mean you and your friends? There isn't anything called "the community" or "The Internet" -- it's just random collations of people, some of whom have a fierce collectivist ideology, some who don't. The constituency of that "we the people" doesn't have territorial boundaries or an army or a constitutional assembly or a parliament, it's just whoever shows up. So -- no thanks! You are not my "we the people". I didn't vote for you; you don't represent me. Don't think that clapping or waving your hands like OWS or clicking "like" or humming like IETF engineers is a substitute for the VOTE in democracy. It most definitely is not.

We already have the 1st Amendment, and that is sufficient. The problem is that corporations control the highways and their TOS is definitely far below the guarantees of the 1st amendment for all kinds of reasons. So the only reasonable thing here is a liberal democracy with a free market is for some providers to emerge who provide First-Amendment level services and refuse to take down speech unless served with a court order after a successful libel suit.

For "Congress to make no law,' first you need an elected Congress, not Internet people.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/01/cerf-is-right-for-the-wrong-reasons-or-the-humming-engineers.html