p01926

GPS data is pretty accurate outdoors, but the second you step inside a store the trace goes completely haywire and bounces round hundreds of meters in all directions. So any warnings will end up so broad as to be useless. Even if just 0.1% of a population are infected, you’ll end up with everyone getting multiple alerts everyday. How does that improve our situation?

Some nuance, but still a biased hit piece. Particularly ugly is when the author dismisses Glenn Greenwald's journalist status, which is beyond doubt, and designates him a mere digital-privacy activist.

The Economist have a history of publishing polarising articles, for and against, regarding Snowden. This book review is likely the work of Edward Lucas (TE's Energy Editor) who has himself written a book alleging Snowden has ties to the FSB (Russian intelligence, formerly the KGB).

Does anyone know where to find a copy of the torrent DB? I think kat had copies on their app page, but the new mirrors omit this.

I dream about a tool like this every time I need to look something up, which only happens about a hundred times every day. I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE.

But reading the kite.com/privacy doc is absolutely gutting. They copy and keep all your code, permanently. That's fine for an open-source project, but it's a deal breaker for anything else. So thanks for the brilliant idea, but I'll wait for it to be implemented in a way compatible with my everyday workflow.

They're really hitting the "nobody should be above the law" talking point hard. How fortunate for us — it sounds good but doesn't survive even casual scrutiny. Crypto might interfere with investigations, but that is very different from being above the law. There are huge numbers of cases where some perp used encryption and was still bought to justice.

The best analogy I can think of is the document shredder. As a society we accept that individuals can protect their personal privacy and safety even if this occasionally frustrates law enforcement investigations. Shedder manufacturers aren't forced to limit how good a job they do to potentially aid LE as this would do more harm than good. And, after all, if you banned shredders, criminals would still be able to just burn their incriminating papers.

It stinks that the case ended like this — without setting a sensible precedent — but I think there is still some upside:

FBI director Comey's "Going Dark" narrative no longer holds water with anyone who's paying attention. He cried wolf so loud he's been heard on every continent. If and when he tries this again, he'll get a ton more blowback.

Similarly, Obama's jibes about security "absolutism" now appear ridiculous. As are his criticism of impenetrable black boxes protecting child molesters. What he really wants is for the Emmental-like extensions of our brains to have even more holes. That's an obviously un-winnable argument.

Also, the bar for proving you've tried all possible alternatives for gaining access just got a lot higher in applying the All Writs Act. It took three months plus a month of major international news stories specifically about this court case to gain entry — something that might really be impossible to achieve next time. But now everyone knows when they swore under oath many times in multiple public venues that they couldn't gain access, what they really meant was "not yet" and not "it's impossible".

Finally, Apple should now be motivated to remove themselves as the weak link in their security ecosystem. System updates shouldn't be possible without first wiping the information needed to derive the encryption key or first supplying that key. I can also dream about them open sourcing their code to allow security researchers to bug hunt (an impossible dream). And maybe they'll change their minds on bug bounties. Whatever happens, it's now beyond doubt that foreign entities are exploiting vulnerabilities in the iPhone and we all expect Apple to beef up their security accordingly — regardless of how this may hinder law enforcement.