Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Encryption [video]
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I really hope the message got through to his audience. We need every single non-technical person in the world to understand this clearly if we have any hope of getting the US Government to back down.
B) Holy Crap! A comedian is the best for reporting on issues that are actually important. What a sad state of journalism we have been for the last decade or so.
My favorite is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o66FUc61MvU
If you think he's "really good" at covering the issues, I strongly suggest tuning your media consumption; you're not even getting one side of an issue so much as one spoon-fed preparation of one side of an issue. You're dangerously underexposed.
(And to be clear, I do think he is fun. I've watched a goodly number of his videos myself. I'm not saying I don't like his schtick... just that it is a schtick.)
Encryption - He shows the FBI public address on the issue and why they are concerned in terms of terrorist. Then shows the Congress and Trump. Points out the ability for the government to "penetrate" any bank, door, etc as needed through a court of law.
Then the issue is the "Pandora's Box" of setting president.
I would like you to show one where there isn't the other side getting their main points presented by John Oliver? Would you be willing to show an example of what shows only one side?
He carefully makes sure that any exposure to the "opposite side" is sandwiched with snark on both sides, and to make sure that none of the strong arguments are shown to you. You are not actually being exposed to the other side, just a soundbite carefully processed to remove any possibility that you might even be so much as intrigued, let alone convinced.
Be honest: When have you been "exposed" to one of these viewpoints and even experience a hint of "Hmmm, maybe I should dig into that position a bit more, I'm not sure John's right here."? All I'm asking for is a twitch. I bet you're too busy laughing for the thought to even cross your mind. (Again... be honest with me. Don't hypothesize about how maybe somebody else might have. Tell me about whether you followed up on a video's points.)
I'm taking a bit of risk putting this challenge out there, because a lot of people read these posts and of all those people, there almost has to be one person who actually can tell a story about how they followed up and came to a conclusion that disagreed with John. But I dunno... I've probably still got decent odds, and I'm quite sure there won't be a long stream of them below this concept.
And let me reemphasize my core point here, which is not that I really expect that much more from a comedian (you are laughing, because he is pretty funny, after all), but that the media doesn't do any better. John isn't doing anything particularly wrong. He ought to be the dessert part of your balanced news and media diet; it's not the dessert's fault that the rest of the meal is short on nutrients.
2) I think you turned this into something else completely :) Please don't be the facts don't matter everything is bias and then never care about what common ground facts people can hold on to. Example Obama going to SxSW for a "Entertainment" festival instead of going to Nancy Reagan's funeral. a) SxSW is also a major technology gathering (We all know that here) b) no other President went to a funeral of a first lady for decades and it was the job of the first lady.
> I decline to volunteer a list of the exact ways in which I disagree with the liberal orthodoxy.
Wait we are talking points of John Oliver not showing both sides. I am Pro-Life and I disagreed with him and he would with me also. Facts are different then conclusions. I never get mad at people for coming to a different conclusion if we both have access to the same facts. I am asking for an example where he doesn't show both sides like you were saying.
Also your tone is a "wee-bit" offensive. I use to be a Systems Librarian and to this day I check everyone's facts with them in person. My kids when they hear something take the phone and ask Google for the answer.
I wasn't saying HE IS FUNNIES I said he covered the story better. It is the fact that no one else covered Net Neutrality in a balanced or informed way at all. The issue had zero traction till John Oliver did his piece. The reason why is he was informed and presented it in a way the general public could understand and they could come up to a conclusion of gee John is right or wrong for themselves.Donald Trump's tweet - https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/32707672042545152...
If you need a joke every 10 seconds or so -- otherwise you lose attention -- I guess it's okay. Seemed to cover this topic well enough. But if you need that amount of humor, if I were you I might want to up my game a bit.
The problem with entertainment disguising itself as useful information is bias. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter to most people what the guy is saying. His criteria for a successful broadcast is something that emotionally moves folks and that he can make entertain people the maximum amount. The viewer's criteria is to laugh and feel like they now understand some complex subject.
Whether or not the information is biased or not never enters the picture between the two parties. In fact, the more complexity that's introduced, the less likely the material is to be entertaining. Likewise, the more you're laughing, the less you're probably learning. But it doesn't matter because everybody's having a good time. Reminds me of talk radio in the early 90s (except the politics are all different, of course)
And the jokes are just part of the Last Week Tonight formula. This is information disguising itself as entertainment, not the other way around. Oliver also did a segment recently about special tax districts that was quite informative, as another example of the LWT formula for you to sample.
You get a lot more information from a LWT piece than from traditional news; the comedy bit might even just be to avoid being sued for satirizing living people (maybe "comedians" can get away with more than "journalists").
John Oliver is entertainment but the News facts are presented better then mainline news.
My case in point: New Neutrality. He singlehandedly turned the whole issue into something people a) could understand b) then decided if it was something they should care about. For YEARS tech community went no where then John Oliver immediately made it into an issue most people understood and changed FCC and Net Neutrality overnight,
It is like the people who, when asked about why some thing should be, they respond "Because it is 2016!" And all their supporters laugh and agree and think the argument has been made. Both sides are really strongly set on talking past each other, and on some issues they are often far closer in opinion than they would ever be willing to admit (especially after all the extreme rhetoric was thrown around).
And my absolute favorite, when you make a careful comparison between two issues to show a comparable line of reasoning, a lot of people will just go "They aren't comparable." No discussion, no attempt to explain why they are different, and if you can manage to get them to keep going, you are going to be swimming in a flood of logical fallacies.
Yeah - This carries some weight.
> Yeah - This carries some weight.
Encryption is not a secret. It's accessible to criminals, and criminals don't give a shit about "backdoor" laws.
In fact, I'd venture to guess that there is great encryption software already available on jail broken iPhones.
What we have also seen in regards to just use of technology is the reign of default. I I doubt that criminals would go for an unlocked iPhone for security reasons for a few reason but one being that is beyond them.
The bits I've read suggest that they don't - or at least not widely.
Eg: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/paris_terrori...
The rest of the speculation in that article was called out and refuted by the link I supplied.
I apologize, if I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel like you're being disingenuous.
1. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/isis-now-has-a-propaganda-s...
Apple also improved the latest iPhones, the OS replace bypass at question here will no longer work. So Signal has an advantage over older iPhones, but not all of them.
Or is this just an attempt at "fair and balanced" reporting, implying that, while they couldn't find any "experts" to take the opposite side, there must be some out there. John Oliver doesn't usually do that though.
Now for a backdoor that you're sharing with a bunch of people...
You take a John Oliver quote, and it contains the current year? Come on.
Handing out the signing key to the USG will probably be quite disastrous as they more likely than not offload it to any 3rd party in the private sector which will offer to make them the next best phone scrapping kit or spyware.
If Apple is compelled and goes trough the software route then it's will be bombarded by 1000's of requests to unlock phones, and worse in the future to potentially install "wiretaps" on phones of suspects not in custody who haven't been charged with anything yet which will be quite a costly operation for Apple.
While cyber criminals are sophisticated it's just not going to be worth the effort for them, most large cyber crimes were pretty low tech.
Foreign intelligence agencies is another deal, but then again they could just as easily penetrate Apple now.
So while there will be some technical risk its really not substantial, the privacy implications however are going to be very severe.
Apple having a well such a key now is problematic but it is necessary. As long as apple only signs individuel versions that is hardcoded to one perticular phone, the danger is not that large. These keys are protected with lots of effort and access to it is limited.
If apple is forced to unlock hundreds of phones they will not sign a version for each phone individually, the will have a version that runs on all phones. This software is way more problematic then the key itself.
This is by the way exactly what the securty expert said in front of the house:
https://judiciary.house.gov/hearing/the-encryption-tightrope...
There are no individual singing keys for phones that would be unmanageable there are probably a handful (or even a single one) singing keys that apple has which are valid on their devices and that's it.
Note that I'm not defending the idea of encryption backdoors. I still believe they are a bad idea, period. I'm just getting annoyed that the pro-encryption crowd here and on other tech sites is engaging in the same kind of out-of-touch hyperbole that the anti-encryption crowd is.
I certainly don't believe they should write the code request by the government but at the same time are they going to keep that stance in all markets?
This way, the government could be granted access for extreme cases, but without the potential for abuse or mass surveillance. Once there were 1,000 check-ins, not more keys could be generated.
Thoughts?
The only way your system could work is if it relied on some sort of TPM, which is essentially security by obscurity.
Anyone can make a tiny isolated network and create a fork that will look real to the target (here, the iPhone).
This is remotely related to the CAP Theorem [1]. Namely, you expect a blockchain not to fulfill the consistency requirement.
Up to now such changes had to pass through the Congress, the laws had to be voted to solve such issues. This time they just quoted the Act which really just says they "may issue all writs necessary or appropriate." (check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Writs_Act ) Almost like citing the Catch 22.
It sounds too trivial but it's fundamentally dangerous in the powers they obtain if their current interpretation is accepted: the state doesn't have to make laws, the government can just write anything whenever it likes and say it's covered by "All Writs."
In the older cases when Apple cooperated Apple didn't have to change anything, neither their future hardware for retail nor the software of the hardware they produce for retail and the cases when nothing has to be changed but just the accessible data copied can be understood to be actually covered with the specific law, CALEA.
And don't forget how weak the argument of the FBI really is, the phone in question was a business phone of the terrorist, who actually intentionally destroyed his private phone before being chased. For this one he didn't care. Apple gave FBI the backup of the business phone, and was able to give them even the current state of it, but the government changed the backup password themselves. And the FBI can actually without Apple copy the data from the SSD disk of the phone and restore it any time to allow them more password tries. But they really want to make the precedent. Because they don't want that Apple produces the next phone on which FBI can't have more access.
This seems highly relevant...
http://9to5mac.com/2016/02/03/iphone-flash-storage-upgrade-s...
And the article that describes the process:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/one-fbis-major-claims-...
Yes it's just a chip that has to be copied, it's not a disk as we understand it in notebooks in a sense "a bunch of chips connected via SATA or M2" it's lower level but the principle is the same.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/one-fbis-major-claims-...
Does this indicate the crypto is already broken?
What's hindering the "intelligence community" from doing it on their own on case by case basis?
Did they already do this?
Does Apple win disproportionately marketing wise by staging it self as the sound and secure provider?
The intelligence community would need access to Apple's firmware signing key in order to do this themselves. (IIRC, in their latest court filing, the FBI actually mentioned this would work for them if Apple is unwilling to implement the firmware changes.)
I.e one big high visibility case where there is general support that the government should have access to a Terrorist's data.
Once Apple has been forced to write this one version of the software, the legal precedent is there to force Apple (and every other company building software and devices) to do it again for all the other devices that any law enforcement agency has on hand, for scenarios that might not have as much support.
Supprisingly their Facebook video isn't...