Posts by izogi
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But if your purpose is to protect yourself from a body like the NSA, then good luck with that
I tend to agree. When your own government, which is meant to represent you and which structures the entire legislative framework in which you have to live, won't commit to not snooping on you (and perhaps even actively does so), there's only so much that can be done short of figuring out how to change how the government does things.
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Little further down, we see Idiot/Savant. He has signed my key, which means that he has used his key to vouch for my key. [---snip--] If you met I/S and verified his key, then that takes you one step closer: You know that his key is not faked, therefore you can be more confident that my key is not faked.
An extension to this is that you really need to trust Idiot/Savant to only ever sign keys which he (I'm just assuming) knows are correct.
About 10 years ago I remember looking up Linus Torvalds' public key on a keyserver. It'd been signed by something like 20,000 different people. It was probably his, but it's likely that the majority of those who signed hadn't met Linus and been given a copy of his public key. At best, they probably knew someone else who'd signed it, and at worst they just assumed it was correct because it was already so popular.
Furthermore, it's necessary to trust that Idiot/Savant has stored his private key securely, because otherwise some random person could be out there pretending to be Idiot/Savant. If it eventuates that he's been storing his private key on a Google server, or elsewhere in the cloud, for the past year, or even that an NSA/GCSB/National-Party operative (or even a family member) "borrowed" his computer for a few minutes a long time ago and didn't leave a trace, and the NSA/GCSB/National-Party has had a copy of the private key during that time, there's already a problem. Everyone who trusted anything based on Idiot/Savant's digital signature being used during that time could be compromised.
Some of the key-signing hardware (like the dinky USB devices) that are available go some way towards addressing the security of private keys, as the hardware doesn't let the private key leave the device, but then you once-again run into issues of needing to trust that Manufacturer-X hasn't been coerced by the NSA to put a back door into their system. Maybe the signing/encryption from the device isn't totally secure, or maybe there is a secret way to get the private key off the device. Someone else probably know much more about this than I do.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to nzlemming,
Guyon:
National fears Jones because he could take votes off them by moving Labour to the centre.
nzlemming:
How much closer to the centre does Espiner think it can get?
I guess there are that faction of National voters who claim they won't vote Labour (right now) because they're paranoid about seeing the Green Party in government.... Maybe there's a thought that Shane Jones wouldn't cater to them as much as Grant Robertson or David Cunliffe might.
I think Labour's biggest problem at the last election, though, was that so many of its traditional voters didn't bother to show up at the polling booths at all. If the government fears anything, surely it should be that a Labour leader might arrive who convinces its traditional supporters of a reason to actually come out and vote on election day.
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Loss of employment is what appropriately happened.... [--snip--]
Cool. Thanks for that, Graeme.
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Peter Graham,
Why not? Someone at the the GCSB ordered an illegal wiretap. They didn't order it because they were mistaken about the facts of the case, they ordered it because they weren't trying especially hard to follow the law.
In my head I keep wanting to compare this with the '95 Cave Creek accident, where 14 people died and 4 more were seriously injured as a consequence of incompetence, unrealistic expectations, and ultimately a badly run government department that was placing unrealistic expectations on its employees. In that case there were calls for individual criminal responsibility of those on the ground because, hey, someone didn't put in the bolts and someone didn't properly attach the concrete counterweight and someone didn't get a proper geotechnical report. These individual prosecutions didn't occur at that level (and I agree with that), but I'm still a bit miffed that DOC's higher level management didn't appear to be held accountable for running the department in the way they were. Effectively, a horribly-constructed platform was built because it was just something employees thought they were expected to do, despite a very constricted resources. The effects of this cascaded throughout the construction such that few people involved were actually qualified or were aware that nobody else was properly taking responsibility for what they were doing.
It's hard to see inside the GCSB for obvious reasons but I could imagine something similar happening if it were badly run such that employees weren't being properly managed in terms of their responsibilities and expectations and qualifications, to the point where if Police asked for something, it'd just be given to them. Where does this nebulous type of responsibility of a hideously run organisation, criminal or otherwise, end up if a department is being run so badly that its employees can act in this way without intending anything malicious? Surely it should be near the top somewhere, and probably more than just a single person? Otherwise there's just a big motivation to mis-manage departments so they can avoid legal responsibility.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to B Jones,
it's just that nobody cares enough to do it provided I don't stick obvious keywords in there, or correspond with known agitators, or have offline activities that might draw attention
(Emphasis mine) That's one of the ones that concerns me a lot, among others. Possibly also corresponding with unknown agitators, and corresponding with people who correspond with agitators. If you send an email to someone like Andrea Vance or Keith Locke for instance, or someone of their ilk, does it provide enough of an excuse behind the scenes for all of your correspondence to be sifted through, or for all of your other contacts to be graphed and analysed?
I used to be really keen on GPG and PGP a long time ago, but as others have noted it's very impractical if you want to actually communicate usefully, given so few people use it as habit. By itself, it also doesn't do anything to obscure the network of people with whom you're communicating, and a lot can already be derived (correctly or not) from that information. -
Hard News: The GCSB Bill: eleventh-hour arguments, in reply to Ben Austin,
Speaking of Dunne, has anyone done anything in the way of polling his electorate since this whole* issue occured?
Indeed, especially as he really only got in to begin with due to National effectively pulling its candidate (who still received 7000 votes!) Unless UF has a surge in popularity nationwide, or National plans to pull its candidate again for other reasons, it doesn't seem as if it'd help him to be doing everything that the National Party does.
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Hard News: It's worse than you think, in reply to Hilary Cameron,
I have to conclude it is not so much that National is approved of, more they are just considered a default option.
Same here, according to impressions of the inlaws (Taranaki farmers). I heard them skyping my wife in the weekly session the other morning, and they're fairly disgusted at everyone (politicians) right now. Thing is, I still can't imagine them casting a vote for any option except the National Party, and I also can't imagine them failing to vote.
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Hard News: It's worse than you think, in reply to Gary Young,
A few of the somewhat heated 'discussions' I had in the smoko room at work made it quite clear to me that the gender of the prime minister of the day was a significant factor in the objections to the policy.
Towards the end of the Labour-led government, I think there were many people who didn't really know why they hated Labour. They just did on an emotional level, which is a sign of how good the destructive marketing was from the other side(s). But people need to justify their opinions to themselves and to others they hang out with, and so we get the "Helen Clark is an ugly bitch" type of reasoning, speckled with phrases like "light bulb" and "nanny state".
The Labour Party hardly helped itself, though. It was very tired in government by 2008.
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Hard News: It's worse than you think, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Apparently people perceive him as some ordinary bloke, the guy next door you happily share a few beers and a good yarn with.
I think people make up all sorts of reasons, but I've heard it argued that, subconsciously at least, he's basically the kind of guy that many people want to become. (He's rich and successful, has a holiday home in Hawaii, he smiles a lot and everything's a breeze, etc.) He's the big marketing image of governing party. To vote against his ability to set the rules is like denying yourself the opportunity to do whatever he did and get $50 million like he did. Or something like that.
That might have something to do with it. In practice I think the lack of a cohesive opposition, the main party of which still hasn't figured out what to do since Helen Clark left, also has a lot to do with it.