Tag: You’re Doing it Right

The Power Of Juries

People often talk about the supposed system of checks and balances that exists within the various levels of government in the United States. Their claim is that the judiciary keeps the legislature in check and vice versa. In reality the system of checks and balances more accurate mimics a circlejerk. If a check and balance system exists in this country it is the jury. Unfortunately too many people have fallen for the bullshit that juries must rule on the letter of the law but sometimes a jury will still recognize its power, which stems from the fact jurors cannot be punished regardless of what their ruling is, and rule against a government goon on a power trip:

Last week a West Virginia woman who stood between her dog and a state trooper intent on killing him was acquitted of obstructing an officer by a jury in Wood County. It took jurors just half an hour to acquit 23-year-old Tiffanie Hupp after they watched the video of the incident that Hupp’s husband, Ryan, shot with his cellphone.

Trooper Seth Cook came to the Hupps’ house on May 9, 2015, in response to a dispute between a neighbor and Ryan’s stepfather. There Cook encountered Buddy, a Labrador-husky mix who was chained outside the house. The dog, whom Hupp describes as “a big baby,” ran toward Cook, barking, and Cook backed up. Even though the dog had reached the end of his chain and Cook was not in any danger, he drew his pistol. “I immediately thought, ‘I don’t want him to get shot,'” Hupp, who was in the yard with her 3-year-old son, told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. The video shows her stepping in front of Cook, at which point he grabs her, throws her to the ground, picks her up, leans her against his cruiser, and handcuffs her.

Stepping in front of a homicidal cop when he’s about to get his murder fix by blasting a dog was a brave move on Tiffanie’s part. Part of me is actually surprised she got through the encounter without being shot herself.

I’m glad to see the jury acquitted her since she did nothing wrong and, in fact, saved an innocent dog’s life. It’s too bad that this officer will likely face no repercussions though. Officer Cook is obviously a dangerous man and should not be trusted with any amount of authority. He should be fired immediately less he kills a dog or kidnaps another person who was only guilty of saving an innocent life.

Amazon Reverses Decision On Disabling Device Encryption

As an update to last weeks’s story about Amazon disabling device encryption in Fire OS 5, the company has since reversed its decision:

Amazon will restore optional full disk encryption to Fire OS 5 in a software update “coming this spring,” according to a statement released by the company on Friday evening.

This is a good announcement but I wouldn’t buy a Fire OS device until the firmware update reenabling device encryption has been rolled out. You never know when Amazon will decide to declare backsies.

As an aside, did you notice how quickly Amazon changed its mind? If this would have been a government decision we would be sitting through years of court cases, congressional hearings, congressional votes, and other such bureaucratic nonsense. But in the market it took less than a week for customer outrage to get things changing. The market gets shit done.

New York Judge Rules Feds Can’t Coerce Apple Into Unlocking An iPhone

In a rare positive judicial ruling, a judge in New York has ruled against the feds who were demanding the power to coerce Apple into unlocking an iPhone:

A US magistrate judge in New York has ruled that the government can’t force Apple to help law enforcement unlock an iPhone using the All Writs Act.

[…]

In the brief, the judge concluded that this is an issue that should be handled by congress. If the government wants to use All Writs or CALEA to force companies to circumvent encryption, there needs to a clear law granting it that power.

It should be noted that this case separate from the San Bernardino one but the ruling could give Apple’s lawyers some judicial precedence to strengthen their argument in that case.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the judge rule that Congress needs to make a law to resolve this debate. What would have been better is a ruling that said the State doesn’t have the power to coerce people into performing labor against their will. Of course such a precedence would effectively invalidate the State itself so I understand why it wasn’t made.

This issue will likely continue to come up until the Supreme Court rules on it. Having the authority to coerce companies into creating backdoors is just too enticing for the feds to roll over on. That being the case, companies should start focusing their efforts on creating software and devices that they are unable to crack. If devices are effectively secured by default it won’t matter what laws are passed or what rulings are made.

Apple Gives The Feds Another Middle Finger


Me right now.

A lot of people are claiming Apple’s decision to fight the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is nothing more than a marketing play. But I swear that I can hear Tim Cook yelling, “Fuck the police!” because his company keeps making announcements that it’s going to make its products more secure:

WASHINGTON — Apple engineers have begun developing new security measures that would make it impossible for the government to break into a locked iPhone using methods similar to those now at the center of a court fight in California, according to people close to the company and security experts.

[…]

The company first raised the prospect of a security update last week in a phone call with reporters, who asked why the company would allow firmware — the software at the heart of the iPhone — to be modified without requiring a user password.

One senior executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity, replied that it was safe to bet that security would continue to improve. Separately, a person close to the company, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed this week that Apple engineers had begun work on a solution even before the San Bernardino attack. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on what she called rumors and speculation.

Independent experts say they have held informal conversations with Apple engineers over the last week about the vulnerability. Exactly how Apple will address the issue is unclear. Security experts who have been studying Apple’s phone security say it is technically possible to fix.

In addition to senior executives talking about upcoming security enhancements, Apple has also added an interesting figure to its payroll:

Frederic Jacobs, for those who don’t know, was one of the developer of the iOS version of Signal, the secure messaging application created by Open Whisper Systems that I highly recommend.

It seems to me that Apple is doing more than marketing here. The company seems dedicated to offering a secure product to its customers. My greatest hope is that this encourages other companies to follow suit.

Apple Tells The Feds To Pound Sand

The technology industry has a long history of being run by antiauthoritarians who bark a lot but roll over as soon as Uncle Sam commands it. This has lead to a great deal of disappointment for me. Fortunately, after the Edward Snowden leaks, some technology companies have started developing a bit of a spine.

Yesterday a robed one in a court room commanded Apple to produce a custom firmware that would allow the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to more easily brute force the passcode on a suspect’s iPhone:

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Riverside, California, ordered Apple to help the government unlock and decrypt the iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who shot up an office party in a terrorist attack in nearby San Bernardino in December 2015.

Specifically, United States Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym mandated that Apple provide the FBI a custom firmware file, known as an IPSW file, that would likely enable investigators to brute force the passcode lockout currently on the phone, which is running iOS 9.

By issuing this order Judge Pym openly stated that he believes Apple is a slave to the federal government and therefore can be forced to perform labor against its will. This is the point where a lot of technology companies would simply roll over and accept their place. Apple has decided it doesn’t want to play ball:

The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand.

[…]

Rather than asking for legislative action through Congress, the FBI is proposing an unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of its authority.

The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force,” trying thousands or millions of combinations with the speed of a modern computer.

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.

It will be interesting to see how far Apple can go in resisting this order but even if it does end up folding under the threat of government guns I want to give the company a hell of a lot of credit for this.

As Apple’s letter notes, this ruling as consequences far greater than this case alone. First, it would set a precedence that everybody is little more than a slave to the robed overlords of the courtrooms. Second, it would introduce an officially signed firmware that is purposely weakened to allow law enforcers to bypass built-in security mechanisms.

The first consequence isn’t anything new since the State has always viewed the people as slaves. But the second consequence is severe. I’m sure the FBI has pinky swore that it will never use this firmware again but anybody familiar with the agency’s history knows such a promise will be broken. And the state of the federal government’s network security means this custom firmware will almost certainly end up online at some point. Then it will be available to nongovernmental terrorists, domestic abusers, and other violent individuals with a vested interest in snooping on their targets.

Whether you like Apple or not, I believe the company deserves a lot of credit for this. I hope it inspires other companies to follow suit.

Freely Accessing Scientific Publications Behind A Paywall

On the one hand we’re told that pure science can only be performed under the “neutrality” of government funding while on the other hand we’re told the research we were forced to fund isn’t ours to access. Having to pay to access research papers that I was forced to fund has been a pet peeve of mine since college. Even though I enjoyed free access to most scientific papers in college the simple fact that I would lose that access as soon as I graduated really rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately I’m not alone. A group of people have developed a service aimed at pirating scientific research papers:

Sci-Hub uses university networks to access subscription-only academic papers, generally without the knowledge of the academic institutions. When a user asks Sci-Hub to access a paid article, the service will download it from a university that subscribes to the database that owns it. As it delivers the user a pdf of the requested article, it also saves a copy on its own server, so that next time someone requests the paper, they can download the cached version.

Unsurprisingly, Elbakyan’s project has drawn the ire of publishers. Last year, Elsevier sued Sci-Hub and an associated website called Library Genesis for violating its copyright. The two websites “operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database,” Elsevier’s lawyers wrote in a court filing, referring to the company’s subscription database.

[…]

But even if the new domain gets shut down, too, Sci-Hub will still be accessible on the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Like its seedy dark-web neighbors, the Sci-Hub site is accessible only through Tor, a network of computers that passes web requests through a randomized series of servers in order to preserve visitors’ anonymity.

Sci-Hub can be accessed via the normal Internet here and via Tor here. That second link is important to have since Sci-Hub was already shutdown once. While it’s feasible for the State to censor the normal Internet it’s not feasible for it to censor Tor hidden services since there is no centralized name server to threaten.

I don’t hide my opposition to intellectual property in all forms but I especially detest copyright applying to criminally funded research. A thief should make reparations to right the wrong they have caused so the only way to right the wrong of the State stealing money to fund favored researchers it to make the findings of their research freely available to everybody.

Using Technology To Avoid The Morality Police

As with every other government on the planet, Iran has a body of law enforcers whose primary job is to exploit wealth from the general populace. Just as in the United States, many of the law in Iran are based around morality. For example, if your manner of dress is deemed inappropriate the law enforcers have an excuse to expropriate wealth from you. The natural tendency of an exploited people is to find a way to avoid as much exploitation as possible. To that end a group of Iranian developers have created an app to help their fellows avoid the morality police:

Ershad’s mobile checkpoints which usually consist of a van, a few bearded men and one or two women in black chadors, are deployed in towns across Iran and appear with no notice.

Ershad personnel have a very extensive list of powers ranging from issuing warnings and forcing those they accuse of violating Iran’s Islamic code of conduct, to make a written statement pledging to never do so again, to fines or even prosecuting offenders.

The new phone app which is called “Gershad” (probably meaning get around Ershad instead of facing them) however, will alert users to checkpoints and help them to avoid them by choosing a different route.

The data for the app is crowdsourced. It relies on users to point out the location of the Ershad vans on maps and when a sufficient number of users point out the same point, an alert will show up on the map for other users. When the number decreases, the alert will fade gradually from the map.

Gershad sounds a lot like Waze, which is a traffic app that lets you report, amongst other things, police. Both are amongst the family of applications that allow the people to fight back against the State. Through crowdsourcing the much larger population of exploited individuals can enjoy a major information advantage over the State. As they used to say at the end of each episode of G.I. Joe, knowing is half the batter.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing the State, because of its sheer power, is an undefeatable foe. In reality the State is greatly disadvantages by the fact it is massively outnumbered. Being a bureaucracy it is also much slower to adapt to changes than the general population. Those two facts combined means the State will always lose in the long run. By the time the Ershad adapt to this application a countermeasure to its adaptions will almost certainly already be in place.

We’re Closer To A Pony Based Economy And Time Travel Technology Than Ever Before

I try to avoid politics but I’m a sucker for free ponies and time travel technology, both of which are platforms for the only presidential candidate that matters, Vermin Supreme. It brings me great joy to say that we’re closer to free ponies and time travel than ever before! Vermin Supreme was in 4th place for the Democratic Party in New Hampshire!

While other politicians were looking for photo opportunities the future overlord of Earth was busy debating one of the lesser presidential candidates:

But that’s exactly what happened to Ted Cruz, whose pit stop was interrupted by his fellow presidential candidate Vermin Supreme, who had some choice words for Cruz that he delivered with a megaphone.

For starters Supreme, who has pledged to give every American a pony, grilled Cruz on whether waterboarding water should be fluoridated and demanded that the candidate come out with his “hands up” and his “pants down.”

Supreme also asked Cruz “Why do you hate America?” before posing perhaps the most salient question of all to prospective voters:

“Will Ted Cruz give you a pony?”

Here Vermin pointed out one of the things that annoys me about the lesser presidential candidates, their unwillingness to discuss important issues. Not one of the other candidates has stated their position on fluoridating water used in waterboarding. Do they believe prisoners have a right to strong teeth or not? We have no idea because none of them have stated their position on their critical matter.

Ted Cruz has also never stated a willingness to transition the United States to a pony based economy, which leads to wonder why he does hate America so much. Fortunately Vermin Supreme is willing to fight the good fight and address the matters that actually impact our everyday lives.

The Next Stage In 3D Printed Firearms

Proving once again that technology overcomes legal restrictions, a new stage in 3D printed firearms has been reached. Instead of a single shot pistol that’s difficult to reload we now have a 3D printed semiautomatic 9mm handgun:

Last weekend a 47-year-old West Virginia carpenter who goes by the pseudonym Derwood released the first video of what he calls the Shuty-MP1, a “mostly” 3-D printed semi-automatic firearm. Like any semi-automatic weapon, Derwood’s creation can fire an actual magazine of ammunition—in this case 9mm rounds—ejecting spent casings one by one and loading a new round into its chamber with every trigger pull. But unlike the typical steel semi-automatic rifle, Derwood says close to “95 percent” of his creation is 3-D printed in cheap PLA plastic, from its bolt to the magazine to the upper and lower receivers that make up the gun’s body.

Heres a video of it firing:

As the article notes, the gun isn’t perfect. The plastic around the barrel apparently starts to melt after firing 18 rounds if sufficient cooling time isn’t given. But the pace at which 3D printed firearms are evolving is staggering. In a few short years we’ve gone from the single shot Liberator pistol to a fully functional semiautomatic pistol. It won’t be long until practical 3D printed firearms are designed.

What does this mean? It means prohibitions against firearms are less relevant. Prohibiting something that any schmuck can make in their home isn’t possible. Alcohol prohibition and the current war on drugs have proven that.

Building A Mesh Network In New York City

One of the biggest weaknesses of today’s Internet is its reliance on centralized providers. Getting Internet access at home usually requires signing up with one of the few, if you’re even lucky to have more than one, Internet service providers (ISPs). In my area, for example, the only real options are Comcast or CenturyLink. CenturyLink only offers Digital subscriber line (DSL) services so the only actual option for me, assuming I want access speeds above 1Mbps, is Comcast. My situation isn’t unique. In fact it’s the norm.

The problem with highly centralized systems such as this are numerous, especially when you consider how cozy most ISPs are with the State. Censorship and surveillance are made much easier when a system is centralized. Instead of having to deal with a bunch of individuals to censor or surveil Internet users the State only has to make a few sweetheart deals with the handful of ISPs. Another issue with heavily centralized systems is that users are at a severe disadvantage. The entire debate surrounding net neutrality is really only an issue because so little competition exists in the Internet provision market. If Comcast wants to block access to Netflix unless I pay an additional fee there really isn’t much I can do about it.

Many consider to this nightmare proof that the market has failed. But such accusations are nonsense because the market isn’t at work here. The reason so little competition exists in the Internet provision market is because the State protects current ISPs from competition. It’s too easy for a massive regulatory entity such as the State to put its boot down on the fact of centralized service providers.

Does all this mean an uncensored, secured Internet is impossible to achieve? Not at all. The trick is to move away from easily identified centralized providers. If, for example, every Internet users was also a provider it would make it practically impossible for the State to effectively control it. That’s what mesh networks can offer and the idea is becoming more popular every day. Denizens of New York City have jumped onboard the mesh network bandwagon and are trying to make local ISPs irrelevant:

The internet may feel free, but it certainly isn’t. The only way for most people to get it is through a giant corporation like Comcast or Time Warner Cable, companies that choke your access and charge exorbitant prices.

In New York City, a group of activists and volunteers called NYC Mesh are trying to take back the internet. They’re building something called a mesh network — a makeshift system that provides internet access. Their goal is to make TWC totally irrelevant.

The hardest part about establishing a mesh network is achieving critical mass. A mesh network needs a decent number of nodes to begin being truly useful. That’s why it makes sense to start building mesh networks in very densely populated areas such as New York City. If the necessary critical mass is achieved in a few major metropolitan areas it will become feasible to bypass centralized ISPs by connecting various regional mesh networks together.

Looking at NYC Mesh’s map of active nodes it seems like they’ve already established pretty decent coverage considering the organization has only been around since January of 2014. If they can keep up this pace they could soon become a viable alternative to local centralized ISPs.