News You Need to Know – Page 56

You Keep Using That Word: Rights Edition

There are a few pages on Facebook I enjoy reading. Occupy Democrats is one of them. Obviously I don’t agree with the philosophy of the page but the administrators running it are either amazing trolls or incredible idiots.

Case in point, they posted this image after last week’s shooting:

What do firearms and healthcare have in common? Almost nothing, which is why this image is so good! First, it tries to tie two unrelated things together. Why? Probably because the creator thought he was being clever by taking a swipe a gun owners and jerking themselves off about how awesome Obamacare has been. Second, it misses the boat by a wide margin.

Are ascetically offensive firearms (what the image creator calls “assault weapons”) a human right? Is healthcare a human right? The answer to both is yes, but not in the way the image creator was implying. Everybody has a right to acquire any firearm they choose just as they have a right to acquire whatever healthcare they choose. But nobody is entitled to either. We return once again to age old negative rights versus idiocy, err, positive rights.

Negative rights mean individuals should be free from interference from other individuals. Positive rights mean individuals should be given whatever is considered a right. The latter is nonsense because giving individuals goods and services necessarily requires enslaving others to make and provide them. If you have a right to healthcare then somebody has to provide it. On the other hand, if you have a right to acquire healthcare that simply means nobody should be allowed to interfere with you entering an exchange with a healthcare provider.

So, yes, firearms and healthcare are human rights so long as you use a sane definition of rights. Anybody who believes the State, or anybody else, should interfere with individuals acquiring either is an asshole.

I’m Off To AgoraFest

You’ve probably noticed this week has already been slow. That’s because I’ve been busy finalizing things for AgoraFest. In addition to the talk I’m giving on cryptography as it relates to agorism, I’m also the head of the mesh networking team so I’ve been flashing a lot of access points with Commotion Wireless firmware.

Anyways, I’m out for the rest of the week. New content will return next week.

If You Don’t Want People Viewing Content For Free Stop Posting It For Free

The war over online advertising just keeps getting better. Even though ad blockers reduce bandwidth usage, increase battery life, and protect against malware there are content providers whining that consumers shouldn’t install them. Some are even claiming that consumers have a moral obligation not to install them and have gone so far as to use loaded terms such as theft.

Now the pro-ads crowd is saying web consumers who view ad supported content while using an ad blocker are hypocrites. I might as well address this pile of bullocks since I’ve already invested so much time on this topic. The pro-ads crowd is painting a false picture. Namely that consumers should feel hypocritical about viewing something that’s been publicly displayed if they’re not viewing it how the creator intended.

Let’s consider a hypothetic scenario. A sculptor homesteads a plot of unused land in Libertariantopia (a magical land where everybody is supposedly a libertarian) and places one of his sculptures on it. He doesn’t build any fences or put up any signs indicating the land is his so people continue to walk through it as they always have. As they walk through his little plot of land they see his sculpture and stop for a moment to admire it. Suddenly the sculptor run at the people and starts screaming, “You can only view that sculpture through blue tinted glasses! You call yourselves libertarians?! You’re a bunch of hypocrites!” Assuming the people admiring the sculpture are good libertarians who believe in property rights, were they hypocrites for viewing that sculpture on the sculptor’s land without blue tinted glasses?

Absolutely not. First, they had no way of knowing they were even on private property since it wasn’t marked as such. Second, there was no indication that the sculptor wanted people to only view his sculpture through blue tinted glasses. Things would have been different had the sculptor fenced his land or put up obvious signs indicating the property was private. Then passersby would be aware that the property was private and not have entered it. Had the sculptor then hung signs stating, “Everybody is granted free entry for the purpose of viewing my sculpture so long as they are wearing blue tinted glass,” everybody entering his property would know that they could enter but their status as guests would be conditional based on the posted terms.

As you can guess this analogy is meant to illustrate accessing ad-supported websites. The sculptor’s plot of land is the website, the sculpture is the content, and the blue tinted glasses are the ads. Most websites have terms of service but they are not clearly posted just as no signs are clearly posted on the sculptor’s land. Under such conditions most visitors will remain entirely ignorant of any special rules they’re expected to abide by.

Unless web site owners clearly display their terms and conditions to visitors before allowing them access to the content they have no grounds on which to call visitors using ad blockers hypocrites. If you want people on your property to act in a certain way that’s outside of social norms, and let’s face the fact that using an ad blocker is now a norm, you should inform them. Don’t scream “Hypocrite!” because visitors are using an ad blocker if you don’t first display terms of services indicating such behavior was not allowed on your website.

What if the visitors aren’t libertarians and therefore don’t respect the owner’s property rights? Then you’ve got a much bigger problem on your hands because their philosophy may very well be socialist in nature and therefore they may view all property, including your content, as public. You’re going to have an even harder time successfully arguing that they’re hypocrites.

Fighting Piracy

Piracy has been the content creator’s boogeyman since Napster. We’ve been told time and again that piracy will destroy musicians, authors, and movie makers even though all three groups are raking in more money now than ever. This is because consumers are willing to pay for content. The fatal flaw in previous efforts to fight piracy has been a reliance on legal strategies. But you can’t sue people into behaving a desired way. You can, however, make them a better offer:

Online entertainment services such as YouTube and Netflix have already taken away a large chunk of BitTorrent’s “market share” in North America and the trend is carrying over to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

[…]

This doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s less torrent traffic, as overall bandwidth use may have doubled in the same period as well. However, other online entertainment services are gaining ground during peak hours.

With 21% YouTube currently accounts for most traffic and Netflix is also on the rise, even though it’s only available in a few countries. In the UK and Ireland Netflix is already good for 10% of peak downstream traffic.

Services such as Netflix and Spotify can succeed in fighting piracy where lawsuits cannot. This is because they rely on providing consumers a convenient service for a price they seem to find fair (judging by the fact both services have a ton of users). For me, as an Apple Music user, paying $10 per month to have easy access to almost all of the music I want to listen to without having to manually manage anything is worthwhile. With BitTorrent I have to search for the music I want, hope there’s a copy in a format I can use, hope there’s enough people seeding it to make the download take minutes instead of days, and finally manually add it to my music libraries (which span across several computers and mobile devices). My time is valuable enough to me that $10 per month is worth not having to do all that dicking around. Apple Music has effectively stopped me from pirating music (not that I ever have because it would be foolish to admit to such a thing on a public page).

Motivations for piracy are often looked at in only dollars. People assume pirates are simply too cheap to pay for content. The calculation isn’t so simple. Pirates steal content for a multitude of reasons including official sources not providing a format they want, the time needed to pirate the content is less than the time needed to acquire it through official sources, or the strings attached to official sources (such as DRM) being too draconian. If content producers want to fight piracy they need to learn why piracy is occurring and offer a solution that addresses those reasons.

Get Your TSA Approved Lock Keys Here

Air travelers who don’t have firearms in their checked luggage probably use a special Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved lock. What is a TSA approved lock? I’ll let the TSA’s very own Blogger Bob explain:

TSA has worked with several companies to develop locks that can be opened by security officers using universal “master” keys so that the locks may not have to be cut. These locks are available at most airports and many travel stores nationwide. The packaging on the locks indicates whether they can be opened by TSA.

In other words TSA approved locks are locks with an included backdoor that can be used by TSA officers to access your luggage. I will take a moment to note that the use of TSA approved locks is not lawful when firearms are in your checked luggage so those of us who do fly with them do not, and legally can not, use TSA approved locks.

Now that I’m done with that aside, let’s discuss the major flaw inherent in backdoors. Backdoors necessarily break security systems, whether they’re physical locks of cryptographic algorithms, because anybody in possession of a master key can gain access. I hear some of you saying, “But, Chris, only authorized TSA agents have access to those master keys!” If only that were the case. Unfortunately some bozo went and accidentally released a picture of the TSA’s master keys.

Now you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, but pictures of keys can’t unlock locks!” While that’s true pictures of keys can be modeled and things that can be modeled can 3D printed. Behold! 3D printer models for TSA master keys! Now anybody with a 3D printer can create keys that can utilize the backdoor on TSA approved locks.

Herein lies the problem with backdoors, it only takes one person to accidentally reveal the master key to render anything secured with the backdoored system insecure. In this case a single careless TSA agent allowed a ring of TSA master keys to be photographed and therefore reproduced by anybody. The same threat would apply to any government mandated backdoors in encryption systems. It would only take one careless person with access to the government master key to have it showing on their screen when a reported took photographed to render all data secured with that system insecure.

The moral of the story is say no to backdoors.

The Imaginary War On Cops

An ongoing war on cops continues to be waged. The situation has become so dire that Obama himself has signed a law to established a special warning system for threats against cops, which will allow cops to drop everything and give themselves the utmost priority. There’s just one problem: the war on cops isn’t real.

With all of the media, blog, and social media coverage of the supposed war on cops you might not realize that this year is looking to be one of the safest years to be a law enforcer:

Despite urgent warnings from police and others about a “war on cops” allegedly linked to the Black Lives Matter protest movement, statistics show 2015 is in fact shaping up to be one of the safest years for law enforcement in a generation.

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP), which keeps data on officer deaths going back over 100 years, 24 officers have been shot and killed by suspects this year. This puts the US on pace for 36 non-accidental, firearm-related police fatalities in 2015. Each one of such deaths is a tragedy for the officers killed, their families and the communities they serve, but this would be the lowest total in 25 years, aside from 2013 which saw 31 such deaths.

Considering all of the terrible deeds cops have been caught doing this year this statistic may seem surprising. But it just goes to show that most people prefer nonviolent solutions to societal problems. Instead of forming lynch mobs and hanging random police officers the vast majority of people have been demanding law enforcers be made to wear body cameras when on duty, face consequences when they perform a misdeed, and be subjected to jury trails when there’s any question about their actions. The public wants accountability, not blood.

Why is there all this hubbub about a war on cops then? Because the State relies on having a powerful, unaccountable police force to maintain its power. Law enforcers today are primarily revenue generators. The more power they wield the more revenue they can generate.

Civil forfeiture is a classic example of this. Under civil forfeiture laws an officer can confiscate property by just saying they believe it’s related to a drug crime and the burden of proving its not falls onto the rightful owners. Since the expense of proving property stolen under civil forfeiture isn’t related to a drug crime is commonly higher than the value of the property the rightful owners seldom goes through the process. Such a scheme only works if officers remain unaccountable because the moment they are accountable they will refuse to confiscate property unless very real evidence exists implying it is tied to a drug crime.

And civil forfeiture laws aren’t the only example of this. Consider the lowly speeding ticket. If you send the municipality that issued it a check the matter goes away. Fighting it, on the other hand, is usually an expensive process because it requires a hearing and those can only be obtained during normal working hours, which means taking time off of work. In addition to that the process is generally one sided because it’s your word against the officer’s and the average judge is apt to side with his fellow over you.

With more people demanding police officers be held accountable the State is in a tough spot. Failing to act on the people’s demands will further raise questions about its legitimacy amongst the people. Expanding law enforcers power to make them even better revenue generators will raise such questions even faster. Therefore it must make it appear as though police officers are targets and need more power to protect themselves against those evil criminals that want them and everybody else dead.

Don’t fall for it. Look at the data and realize that law enforcers today are much safer than law enforcers were in the past.

Same Exploits, New Target

I can’t wait for self-driving cars to hit the market. If there’s one thing I won’t want to waste my time doing it’s driving. Unfortunately public transportation is limited by destinations and times. Why should I schedule my entire day around the whims of a public transportation provider when I can have the best of both worlds?

But a lot of people don’t agree with me. The biggest argument I hear against self-driving cars is that they could make mistakes. This is an especially laughable argument since humans make mistakes while driving frequently enough to kill over 30,000 people per year in the United States alone. Another argument against self-driving cars is that hackers can more easily manipulate them into performing undesirable actions such as going to an incorrect destination or crashing. Seemingly supporting this argument is recent research that demonstrated how self-driving cars could be manipulated by feeding their sensors faulty data:

The multi-thousand-dollar laser ranging (lidar) systems that most self-driving cars rely on to sense obstacles can be hacked by a setup costing just $60, according to a security researcher.

“I can take echoes of a fake car and put them at any location I want,” says Jonathan Petit, Principal Scientist at Security Innovation, a software security company. “And I can do the same with a pedestrian or a wall.”

Using such a system, attackers could trick a self-driving car into thinking something is directly ahead of it, thus forcing it to slow down. Or they could overwhelm it with so many spurious signals that the car would not move at all for fear of hitting phantom obstacles.

This isn’t as damning as many people are making it sound. While the target has changed the exploit hasn’t. You can cause all sorts of havoc by feeding human drivers false data. Drivers have driving into bodies of water because their navigation software fed them incorrect data. Putting up fake road signs can manipulate people into taking wrong roads. Using an FM transmitter to broadcast a fake emergency message can cause all sorts of chaos.

Humans, like machines, use sensory input to make decisions. That sensory input can be exploited, which is how a lot of less likely to be lethal weapons work. Where machines differ is that they’re easier to update to protect against sensory exploitation. Sensory exploits on self-driving cars are likely correctable with software updates.

As machines continue to replace the need for human labor let us not forget that many of the weaknesses present in machines are also present in ourselves.

Law Enforcers Have It Too Easy

Law enforcement agents are being more heavily scrutinized now than they have been in the past. This is a much needed trend since law enforcers have been acting (and still continue to act) with very little accountability. In addition to raising awareness of the dangers created by allowing law enforcers to act without accountability this trend has also given rise to two extremes. One extreme wants to see every law enforcer gunned down in the streets. The other extreme wants everybody to get down on their hands and knees to lick the boots of every law enforcer. While most people are asking what can be done to hold law enforcers accountable for their actions the two extremes are embroiled in a battle of rhetoric.

Neocons tend to lean towards the boot licker extreme. Scott Walker is a classic example of this. To prove his piety he typed an article claiming that law enforcers today are being targeted far more than law enforcers were when he was growing up. Because he’s running for president (at least I think he is, I can’t be bothered to remember all of the completely irrelevant Republican candidates) he had to blame Obama but even setting that point aside his claims are bullshit:

Walker was born in 1967. In a blog post a few months ago, my former intern Dan Wang looked at the fatality and homicide figures for police going back to the 1960s. Here are a few notable numbers he found:

“More officers were feloniously killed in the 11 years between 1970 and 1980 (1228 deaths) than in the 21 years between 1993 and 2013 (1182 deaths).” Walker would have been 3 in 1970 and 13 in 1980.

Between 1971 and 1975, when Walker would have been between age 4 and 8, an average of 125 police officers were feloniously killed per year. Between 2006 and 2010, the average was 50. In 2013, just 27 officers were feloniously killed. In 2014, it was 51. So far this year, the number of cops killed with firearms is down 16 percent from last year. Two of those officers were killed by other cops.

If you look at the rate at which cops are killed, the numbers are even more dramatic. There are quite a bit more police officers today than there were in the 1970s. So in 1975, for example, when Walker was 8, there were about 411,000 cops on the street, and 129 police officers were feloniously killed. That’s a rate of 31.38 murders per 100,000 officers. In 2013, the rate was about 5. Last year it was higher at 9.4, but that still means the rate was about 3.5 times higher than when Walker was growing up.*

To put those rates into perspective, consider the death rate for fishermen, the most dangerous job in America: 131 deaths per 100,000. Even if you factor in traffic fatalities and other accidents, policing isn’t among the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Another way to look at these figures: The murder rate for police officers is about the same of the overall murder rate in cities such as Bakersfield, Calif.; Louisville; and Omaha.

The rate of assaults on police officers has been falling, too. So you can’t argue that cops are safer solely because they’re killing more criminals, or because they have better equipment (though there’s evidence that the latter has helped). People are just less likely to attack police today than they’ve been in the past. And that’s despite the increased public scrutiny.

Even with the much deserved increase in scrutiny being a police officer today isn’t nearly as dangerous as it was in decades past. In fact law enforcement isn’t even in the top 10 list of deadliest jobs. You’re more at risk being being an aircraft pilot than you are being a cop.

As an anarchist I don’t believe the State is a legitimate entity. Because of that I don’t believe the State has any business involving itself in law enforcement. I believe government law enforcement agencies; be they federal, state, or local; should be disbanded and replaced with market solutions. With that said, I don’t agree that police officers should be gunned down in cold blood. Many law enforcers should be charged with the crimes they’ve committed and forced to pay restitution. Some officers are almost certainly deserving of being declared outlaws. In other words justice, real justice, should be served. Murdering officers ensures justice won’t be served.

Licking their boots also ensures justice won’t be served. So long as a handful of people are given authority over everybody else, a concept I hope to see abolished someday, that handful should be scrutinized with extreme prejudice. Every action they take should be analyzed under a public microscope. Nothing they do in their official capacity should be private. Boot lickers whine that such transparency makes law enforcers’ jobs harder. Good! Their job should be hard. The second wielding authority becomes easy it gets abused. Justice can only be served if those tasked with providing it are subject to oversight.

Law enforcers have it too easy today. That needs to change. But gunning them down in cold blood isn’t the answer.

End The Bathroom Wars

Out society is finally, albeit slowly, moving away from ruthlessly enforcing strict binary gender identities. For reasons unknown to me this is making some people very uncomfortable. Those uncomfortable souls lack any real argument for why this move is unacceptable so they’ve resorted to emotional appeals. The most common form of this manifests in an obsession with bathrooms. When a transgender individual expresses a desire to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as implications that they’re really sexual predators wanting to prey on innocent girls are made (apparently these bathroom obsessed individuals don’t realize female-to-male transgender individuals exist).

In the most recent episode of this bathroom obsession a bunch of high school students staged a walkout:

(KMOV.com) – More than 150 students walked out of Hillsboro High School over a dispute about the use of the girl’s locker room by a transgender student.

The walkout lasted for about two hours. Roughly 30-40 people showed support for senior Lila Perry, who wants to use the girls’ locker room during gym class. Perry was born a male but said she has identified as a female since 13.

“There’s a lot of ignorance, they are claiming that they’re uncomfortable. I don’t believe for a second that they are. I think this is pure and simple bigotry,” said Perry.

A short distance away, a counter protest was being held by people claiming they have relatives at the high school.

“Boys needs to have their own locker room. Girls need to have their own locker room and if somebody has mixed feelings where they are, they need to have their own also,” said protester Jeff Childs.

I’m a peacemaker by nature… you’re not buying that, are you? Admittedly I’m an extremely opinionated man with an obvious bias on this topic. But like Thorgeir Thorkelsson my bias doesn’t prevent me from being capable of advocating for a mutually beneficial outcome.

The fact of the matter is the strict binary gender identity is becoming a thing of the past (and good riddance, people should be free to define themselves on their own terms). That being the case segregating bathrooms by gender is silly. Why not just give everybody an individual stall so they can do their business in peace? It would allow these bathroom obsessed individuals to finally calm the fuck down and alleviate us men from ensuring we’re always in compliance with proper bathroom etiquette.

This is the setup at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis. The bathroom area is located in the basement. It’s composed of individual stalls and a common sink for hand washing. In my opinion it’s the best setup because it isn’t based on assumptions about customers and fulfills customers’ expectations that a bathroom will be made available.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong

In addition to war being immoral I also disagree with the United States’ involvement in the Middle East on practical grounds. The biggest one being the fact that nobody in the United States government seems to have a goddamn clue of what they’re doing. I get the feeling that the top brass and other people “in the know” are throwing darts at a dartboard of ideas and going with whatever one they hit. That can be the only explanation for suggesting something like this:

The former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has been quietly urging U.S. officials to consider using so-called moderate members of al Qaeda’s Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, four sources familiar with the conversations, including one person who spoke to Petraeus directly, told The Daily Beast.

The circle of unintended consequences continues! Back in the day the United States government funded and armed al Qaeda because it was fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After the Soviet Union ceased being a thing al Qaeda eventually turned its sights on the United States and flew a few planes into a few buildings. This resulted in the United States basically bombing everybody in the Middle East as it pursued its revenge. Now things are looping back to the beginning where people “in the know” are seriously arguing that the United States needs to fund and arm al Qaeda.

I like to say the government is incompetent at everything it does except wield violence but this kind of shit makes me think it’s event incompetent at that.