This has nothing to do with a monopoly, so antitrust law is totally not applicable here. You might be thinking "class action lawsuit", which someone might attempt. However, if Apple can show that this is actually a mechanism to provide maximum screen time for the life of the battery (as opposed to malicious planned obsolescence), the suit would likely fail.
It is but you see less screen time instead of degraded performance. The suggestion here is that Apple is throttling the hardware via software in order to prevent reduced screen time.
Also, after 3-4 years with a laptop, you typically start to see decreased performance because of clogging of fans, degradation in the thermal paste, etc. This causes the CPU to run hotter and throttle sooner to stay inside of its thermal envelope.
I don't know enough about the physics, but it could be similar to the difficulty in making glasses-free 3D TVs. Things like the Nintendo 3DS only succeeded because they naturally dictate the viewer's position. I imagine that this kind of thing would be easier to develop if you could control the focal point (i.e.: strapping someone's eyeballs into place).
Also, this will only further increase the value of maintainable machines. A machine with good and accessible/serviceable cooling means that redoing the thermal paste after 3-4 years will be both feasible and helpful.
Thank you. I still have this argument with people today. I think it's laziness for many devs. ASI is an _error correction mechanism_ that Eich added because there was no compile step in JS in 1995. It helped people ship code without having to spend forever tracking down missed semicolons or worry about getting bit by one in an undertested code path. It is part of the language. If you hate semicolons that much, go write VB/Ruby/Python...
A more "air gap"-ish concept would have been a camera on the Firefly. Take a pic of a QR code on the phone, sign on the device, use the phone to take a pic of the output QR.
I'm just critiquing the air gap design/claim. Getting a malicious QR code in front of the camera would either require the attacker to gain physical access to the device, at which point it is game over for any device, or they would have to compromise the app presenting the first QR code. This would be a problem regardless of the air gap design for something like this, even if you had to enter the data by hand into the device.
If I understood correctly, the wireless transmission is one way. So the attacker would ask the wallet to sign a transaction, then the confirm button would be mistakingly pressed... and you have to scan the screen to be able to send that transaction.
Possible problem: The attacker sends a transaction at the same time (or just before) a legit one is sent.
Not a big deal: The user is asked to send a specific quantity to a specific address on the screen. If somehow the user didn't check or the attacker fooled him with the same quantity etc, the picture still has to be taken and check it is the same transaction. Additionally, the wireless communication can have a second authentication factor.
I'm by no means going to support government attempts to ban encryption, but assuming 100% virtuous purposes (e.g.: counter-terrorism efforts), I can understand why they think this will work. I mean, they think that passing laws on guns and drugs will stop those things.
The fundamental problem is that the government and the public do not understand that powerful encryption will exist forever now. The cat is out of the bag, and the bag has disintegrated. You can't ban the ideas, and you can't stop them from being implemented in the shadows. Even worse for them, there's nothing physical to find. You can't train a dog to sniff out encrypted data. Banning it now only hurts honest uses, like protecting financial transactions and medical records.
Thing is, gun control laws work. See Scotland after Dunblane, Australia after Port Arthur. See Canada’s per-capita murder rate and gun death rate in comparison to those of the U.S., where gun control laws are essentially nonexistent.
Passing the right laws on drugs (abuse) works (see Portugal). Prohibition doesn’t, but treatment does. (And, the truth is that the drug laws in the U.S. are working; they just aren’t working for the citizenry, but the police state. This is by design, and there’s a not-insignificant marginalization/targeting of minorities by design in these laws, too.)
Encryption is…rather more subtle to deal with, because you cannot weaken it for one purpose without weakening it for all purposes, because math and physics. Better that they work on laws that target actions and behaviours rather than technologies. Then again, any time I see a politician talking about terrorism, I recognize that they are attempting to increase their own power at the expense of those without power to begin with.
I agree about "right" drug laws, but many of the countries supporting this idea are not "right" drug law kind of places.
As for guns, they trot out "terrorism" as the reason for wanting to get rid of encryption. Well, gun laws have yet to stop terrorism. If they couldn't find a gun, they made a bomb, or they used an airplane, etc.
Strong gun laws have, in fact, stopped most mass killings in places that have them. Not entirely, obviously (the mass attack on the Bataclan theatre and elsewhere in Paris in 2015), but these are exceptions.
In the U.S., there have been more than one mass shooting every month in 2017 even under the most ridiculous definition (4+ people killed, indiscriminately, in a public place; this would not include someone who killed 5 people in a targeted manner). Using a looser definition (4+ people killed or injured), there have been almost 7 per week in the U.S.
There have been far fewer than that in Canada. In Toronto, there have been 26 murders total, and perhaps two “mass shootings” by either definition. The main mass shooting story in Canada this year is the terrorist attack on the mosque in Quebec. In the U.S.? Too many to say that there’s a main one (although the attack on the Congressional baseball game will probably be the one that gets talked about).
> passing laws on guns and drugs will stop those things.
Problematic comparison. Politics aside, gun laws can definitely achieve publicly desired outcomes. E.g. handgun ban in Australia. Drug laws mean your paracetamol won't poison you.
Encryption laws where you want to have your cake and eat it are a very different matter.
Gun regulations and drug bans do not stop the worst of the worst from getting their hands on those things. They will literally manufacture their own guns and drugs if they have to (see marijuana grow ops and this Vice article on cartel gun makers https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78xa99/the-cartel...). Banning encryption will not stop the underbelly of society from using it either. They'll just hire some black hats to build it for them.
I doubt that. They very much want to read people's email, etc. At a minimum, they want to do it to find terrorists. The maximum is just corrupt without bound.
> You can't train a dog to sniff out encrypted data
?? But you can easily train a computer to. I mean, it's expensive as hell, but if all encryption is either back-doored, banned, or weaker than a newspaper cryptogram, then yeah... sure. Encrypted data is easy to find - it's the data you can't read.
The data you can't read is not only encrypted data. Most unencrypted data will be data you can't read, due to there being absurd amounts of file formats and protocols. How do you intend to be able to validate that the content of all, say, CAD and 3D model files is not malicious? How will you deal with new codecs? New network protocols?
Encrypted data is, unless the protocol is severely broken, almost indistinguishable from random data, which without context and knowledge of all file formats and protocols in the world, is indistinguishable from most real, unencrypted data. And not only that, you can hide information in almost any data type. Encrypted content can be hidden in a perfectly normal looking picture or video just fine. Look up steganography.
Encrypted communication cannot be detected in any sane manner.
> Most unencrypted data will be data you can't read, due to there being absurd amounts of file formats and protocols
Well I sure couldn't read it, but the NSA could.
> How will you deal with new codecs? New network protocols?
With a massive staff and constant influx of money. I did say it would be expensive. Still, I think it's within the reach of state-level actors.
> Encrypted data is, unless the protocol is severely broken, almost indistinguishable from random data, which without context and knowledge of all file formats and protocols in the world, is indistinguishable from most real, unencrypted data.
Sure- context is a critical tool. I don't know why you stipulated "without context", though.
> Encrypted content can be hidden in a perfectly normal looking picture or video just fine. Look up steganography.
UNencrypted data can be hidden in the same way. I know what steganography is, and sure, the art of hiding data is a great way to hide data. Separate issue, though.
> Encrypted communication cannot be detected in any sane manner.
I think the facilities and manpower for detecting unauthorized use of encryption would indeed be insane, from several perspectives. And it would require a bunch of legislative support, too. But WITH legislative support, mandated back doors, ISPs that are cooperative, shitloads of manpower and money.... Yeah, I think it would be possible to detect encrypted traffic. Could a person who hadn't already attracted the attention of the "agencies" choose to hide small amounts of data in an innocuous file? Sure, but they could glue an SD card to a homing pigeon, too. I'm thinking more of PGP, SSL, VPNs, WhatsApp and the like.
No amount of staff will be able to predict file formats and protocols before they are designed, and unless file formats and protocols are permitted prior to being "understood" by this hypothetical internet filtering agency, then no new formats or protocols can be formed, or even updated. However, permitting them prior to being understood also mean that arbitrary traffic will be permitted, as long as the formats and protocols mutate faster than they are implemented by the bad guys (the state-level actors you describe).
The only scenario where I can think of a setup where a filtering agency would be able to block "dangerous content", while still permitting legit use, would be one where each and every file format and protocol creation/update would require applying for a permit to the respective agencies in every country where the format is to be used. The absurd bureaucracy this would entail, such as the time it takes for the agency to write some form of verification, would kill most, if not all, innovation. The only innovation I could imagine still living in such an environment would be circumvention efforts.
Furthermore, steganography is not a separate issue. In the hypothetical scenario where this is both possible and the resources for this exercise are present, the entire exercise becomes moot once you realize that you can encode anything as a jpeg or video file with a minimal overhead. Applications would just all implement protocols that exchange JPEG's or MP4's with a small overhead, leading to no traffic being stopped as "unreadable".
And before you ask: Detecting such measures is not possible in the general case.
That assumes you are aware of every file format ever and can also spare the resources to search through every file. Otherwise, the inside of a large compressed file has about as much entropy as an encrypted one.
History would seem to suggest that it will be trivial for people with bad intentions to sway public opinion against encryption as they did in the past against things like cannabis, or the many books which have been banned. All it will take his associating encryption strongly with the despised group and that will be that for decades. I want to believe otherwise but it's happened with issues much simpler and much easier to understand than encrypted data.
I don't disagree that they could succeed with this method of attack. The problem is that it doesn't solve any problems. Encryption is a thing that humanity knows about. It's not going away. We're not going to stop knowing how to make guns, knives, drugs, or anything else that has been banned. And encryption just requires some computers. They're ubiquitous now. Encryption is baked into so many things that it would be impossible to stop as a concept.
I remember doing a long research paper on the World Bank and IMF around 2000. They're the equivalent of "pay day loans" for 3rd world countries. It's predatory lending at its finest. For those unfamiliar, they generally only give money if countries cut spending on the people (education, health, etc) and open up natural resources for exploitation by foreign corporations.
The countries the World Bank lends to are typically spending at unsustainable levels. It's not a choice between IFC loans and high social spending. It's defaulting on lenders, who may be allies or the domestic population, cutting social spending due to not having money and/or running the presses to hyperinflation.
Yes and there's a reason why they are spending so much. It's encouraged. The developing country's elites get a big kickback, their nation gets saddled with a horrible loan, while their raw resources leave the country.
The Dictator's Handbook references more reliable and comprehensive research showing the anti-democratic effects of foreign aid. That said, the counterfactual (watching and waiting) risks anarchy. The World Bank was set up, in part, from the lessons of the Weimar Republic. It's a difficult debate that escapes easy answers.
Do you know how much it costs to get your water and electricity turned back on? Not to mention that you have to toss any food you have saved and you have to find some way to live without access to toilets, etc for the duration.
Compared to that, a payday loan is cheap. Yeah being in that situation is shitty in the extreme, and no none of your options are good, so you are trading very bad for worse.
But of course the underlying forces that create the necessary conditions for payday loans (and the World Bank) aren't necessarily beyond critique.
Both critics and advocates of the World Bank claim that it's just one component of a larger international order. If that order is manufacturing the need for WB/payday loans then the WB/payday loaners could be worthy of modest praise but also extreme condemnation.
IMO the debate over the relative merits of WB/IMF is really inseparable from a larger debate about the post-WWII western political/financial system. And, unsurprisingly, I imagine ground truth isn't easily compressible into any one coherent narrative -- especially an ideological one.
The payday loan analogy is admittedly weak. I just meant to indicate that it's a crap deal. It is actually worse than payday loans. See, with payday loans, you just pay ridiculous interest. With WB/IMF loans, it's more like "we'll loan you money to keep the lights on, but you're going to have to stop taking your blood pressure meds, and one of our friends is going to stop by and eat some of your dinner every night".
I just get tired of people constantly harping on payday loans without considering the alternatives available. Also I was kinda shocked how much an effect it had when a collegue got his power turned of (he forgot the pay his bills).
This characterization misses the bigger picture. Governments know what they are getting when they ask for these loans, and they want it! They are in financial trouble and need to cut spending on education, health, gas and bread subsidies, etc., but politically this is impossible. Their solution: Blame the big bad bank. The government gets what it wants and the bank agrees to play the bad guy.
There is likely corruption throughout these governments too. They're getting loans at the expense of their citizens, often hurting the poorest the most. I'm not saying it's all the WB/IMF's fault, but helpful loans shouldn't carry conditions like these:
- Cutting expenditures, also known as austerity.
- Focusing economic output on direct export and resource extraction,
- Devaluation of currencies,
- Trade liberalisation, or lifting import and export restrictions,
- Increasing the stability of investment (by supplementing foreign direct investment with the opening of domestic stock markets),
- Balancing budgets and not overspending,
- Removing price controls and state subsidies,
- Privatization, or divestiture of all or part of state-owned enterprises,
- Enhancing the rights of foreign investors vis-a-vis national laws,
As I said in another comment, the IMF and world bank were created after ww2 when european colonial powers decided to "band together" rather than fight each other.
The IMF and World Bank are neocolonial institutions. The brits, dutch, french, etc decided to pool their resources together to exploit the world rather than fighting each other to exploit the world.
It's just colonization 2.0. Instead of invading nations, they destabilize them via economic warfare and then "buy/exploit" these nations. It's far more cost effective and effective.
It made it to 25k by gen 160. Then it deviated an started losing again. Gen 250 was virtually unstoppable, hitting 120k. Watching gen 251 right now, and it just crushed 100k... 150k... 200k... 242k. Wow. And Gen 252 is killing it too. Seems to have found a sweet spot.
