A Phone is not a House
Freemor at 2016-04-01T13:21:48Z
A Phone is not a House
2016-04-01 by Freemor
With the ongoing debate about strong encryption on mobile devices, I'd like to take a moment to clear up a misconception that I've seen tossed around and sadly accepted by too many people.
To be clear anyone that reads my stuff will know that I fall well inside the "must have strong crypto" camp. So the views expressed here will clearly be coloured by that.
The point I want to clear up is this new comparison of cell phones to physical spaces. The argument tends to go like this: "Peoples homes are private but the government can get a warrant to search them. So the government should be able to do the same for Phones."
On the surface that may seems to make sense and I suspect that is why people are buying into it, but the truth is much closer to saying: "Peoples homes are private but the government can get a warrant to search them. So the government should be able to do the same for private conversations."
What the government is seeking is not access to a physical space but rather retroactive access to private conversations. The government has never had the ability in the past to compel you to divulge what you said to your friend last Tuesday. Especially if such might be incriminating.
By wanting all encryption breakable the government is trying to do an end run around your right to remain silent, or plead the 5th, or what ever the equivalent is in your country.
Cell phones are by definition communication devices, not dwellings, not safes, not a place of business. Cell phones store and transmit conversations, which is speech, which has special safe guards when talking privately with another individual.
Yes there are wiretaps and police can get a warrant to get a wiretap. But wiretaps have never been retroactive. Remember it's "You have the right to remain silent,anything you say may be used against you in a court..."
How safe do you feel knowing that by breaking into your phone and having retroactive access to your speech, "anything you say" now includes much of what you said for the last 2, 3, 5 years. Did you have an indiscretion that they can blackmail you with? Did you joke with a friend about robing a bank? Did you talk with someone about the possibility of fudging your taxes a bit? Did you get really drunk after a break-up and text something that could be considered a threat? And on, and on.
One of the reasons that speech is protected is because it is so easy to twist and use against someone. As the famous quote goes "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
We can not, we must not allow governments and police to have easy unfettered retroactive access to our speech going back years. It removes too many safeguards and tips the balance of power dangerously to the side of the already powerful.
Keep private conversations private. Say No to big brother.
from: My Blog
Guruprasad L, organictraveller, Sean Tilley, Debacle and 13 others likes this.
Guruprasad L, Iñaki Arenaza, Sarah Elkins, EricxDu and 13 others shared this.
Very well said!
interesting twist, at least in the US, passwords are also considered speech and thus subject to those protections against government coercion, but biometrics, such as fingerprints, are not. So at least here, the police can't force you to give the password to unlock your phone, but they can compel you to unlock it with a fingerprint scanner if that'll work by itself.
Elena ``of Valhalla'' at 2016-03-11T20:45:28Z
File not found on execA simple, standard, C program. Compiling and running it shouldn't produce any surprises... except when it does. The first time I got that, it was quite confusing. So, strace to the rescue -- I thought. But nope: No luck there. What's going on? No, it's not some race condition whereby the file is being removed. A simple ls -l will show it's there, a...
So this is why when you try to run an executable for the wrong arch you get that obscure error!
(I've had it happen a few times with arm executables on x86, evidentely because I also have binfmt_misc and qemu configured, and I've always wondered what the * was happening.)
I'm still convinced that binfmt_misc is magic, probably black magic (but quite wonderful when it works).Federico, Charles Stanhope likes this.
Who would you trust?
Elena ``of Valhalla'' at 2016-02-22T17:31:51Z
Random person on the internet wrote:The distribution model is broken! if you get your software from a distribution you have to trust the package maintainer not to add malicious code!
While the concern is valid, who would you rather trust? A random upstream author who pushed their code on github or somebody who went through a long procedure to prove their trustworthiness before they were granted the ability to put code in the distribution unsupervised?Federico, Sarah Elkins, sazius likes this.
moved away shared this.
Elena ``of Valhalla'' at 2016-02-14T08:49:31Z
Why I am not touching node.jsDear node.js/node-webkit people, what's the matter with you?
I wanted to try out some stuff that requires node-webkit. So I try to use npm to download, build and install it, like CPAN would do.
But then I see that the nodewebkit package is just a stub that downloads a 37MB file (using HTTP without TLS) containing pre-compiled binaries. Are you guys...Federico, Tupulpo, Stephen Michael Kellat likes this.
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Elena ``of Valhalla'' at 2015-11-20T19:32:02Z
Somebody please design a board game that use those stickers as tiles.
Bonus points if it uses pieces from the piecepack (because. public. domain. boardgame. kit.).
I'm seriously considering printing out a couple of sets on cardstock and start moving them around in search of ideas, but I have zero experience as a game designer.
P.S. the link at the bottom in "License: Same as git-annex logo" points to a page where there is no mention of a license; after a bit of browsing I've found http://source.git-annex.branchable.com/?p=source.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian/copyright;hb=HEAD (I guess this is the relevant url, is it?).
Federico likes this.
@valhalla@identi.ca OK. So a game idea: making sure you get the most patches into the master repository. You'd need different tiles for different levels of git merge strategies... Maybe counter tile plays with limited cards like, maintainer lost patch, merge conflict, disk failure...
BDFSM preview
Elena ``of Valhalla'' at 2015-09-29T12:52:26Z
I've picked up crossstitch after a long while; this is my current WIP.
See the author's blog (textual and discorsive, but not completely SFW) for context on the phrase.Federico, Charles Stanhope, jrobertson likes this.
Elena ``of Valhalla'' at 2015-10-14T19:00:14Z
Halloween Cyberpunk 2015Crediamo che la comunicazione con strumenti digitali sia un diritto fondamentale dell’essere umano moderno. Lavoriamo per costruire una rete che difende questo diritto e stiamo organizzando una raccolta fondi.
Sabato 31 Ottobre 2015 non potete mancare ad Halloween Cyberpunk 2015!Federico likes this.
Mike Linksvayer at 2015-05-08T19:03:07Z
If people who want to reduce software freedom didn't whinge about the GPL it would be a sign that the GPL wasn't aggressive enough about enforcing software freedom. There doesn't seem to be all that much whinging to me. More people using AGPL coupled with lots more enforcement might produce more, signalling, um, "balance." :)Federico, sazius, Douglas Perkins, Stephen Michael Kellat and 2 others likes this.
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Lars Wirzenius at 2015-05-06T13:23:12Z
Also, even if you do do that, stop whinging that GPL is a bad license because it makes it so much work to violate software freedom.Federico, Douglas Perkins, Stephen Michael Kellat, lnxwalt@microca.st and 6 others likes this.
Lars Wirzenius at 2015-05-06T12:54:47Z
If you have to ask "if my code calls GPL'd code in this complicated way, can I avoid having to be GPL-compatible?" then the answer is pretty much always "you're trying to reduce freedom, stop it".Federico, Olivier Mehani, Stefano Zacchiroli, Douglas Perkins and 15 others likes this.
Stephen Michael Kellat, Stefano Zacchiroli, Douglas Perkins, Douglas Perkins and 5 others shared this.
Also, even if you do do that, stop whinging that GPL is a bad license because it makes it so much work to violate software freedom.Lars Wirzenius at 2015-05-06T13:23:12Z
Federico, Douglas Perkins, Stephen Michael Kellat, lnxwalt@microca.st and 6 others likes this.
If people who want to reduce software freedom didn't whinge about the GPL it would be a sign that the GPL wasn't aggressive enough about enforcing software freedom. There doesn't seem to be all that much whinging to me. More people using AGPL coupled with lots more enforcement might produce more, signalling, um, "balance." :)Mike Linksvayer at 2015-05-08T19:03:07Z
Federico, sazius, Douglas Perkins, Stephen Michael Kellat and 2 others likes this.
JanKusanagi @identi.ca at 2015-04-26T13:48:19Z
A little offtopic:
For those new pumpers who came here to follow @Debian Project, let me post a link to our Pump.io User Guide, so you can get more out of Pump.io =)
Cheers! o/
Federico, Mike Linksvayer likes this.
Releasing Debian jessie: What project wide changes require.
Debian Project at 2015-04-25T18:57:20Z
Debian is a huge project, 1000+ developers, 21000+ sources. Get a feeling of what project wide changes requires: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/History
Federico, der.hans, Francisco M García Claramonte, lostson likes this.
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