downer94

What about that whole thing about geographic proximity to the school in question?

How does one reconcile a particular choice if it involves a long commute or relocation? And do families living in close proximity receive priority enrollment over students residing outside of a given district?

It's either that or sharks with frickin' "LASER" beams attached to their heads...

Oh, I dunno, maybe by promising to vaporize it with multiple thermonuclear warheads? I mean, I did contrast the idea with an a attack involving a hypothetical Dyson sphere...

That's the one!

Well, what if you just ransom it? Targeting it is hardly destructive.

Bruce Schneier once equated the security of a 256 bit private key by comparing the energy needed to brute force all possible combinations of 256 bits to the amount of energy harnessed for one year by a Dyson Sphere built around the sun.

So maybe there's a correlation, in the sense of knowing the GPS coordinates of Fort Knox, and targeting it with an ICBM?

And so, as Microsoft Windows continues its precipitous decline, that bastard abomination known as the Windows systray icon finds a way to ride the mass exodus to Mac OS, much like small pox found its way to The New World across the ocean.

If I had a factory job, the last thing I'd ever want is for my picture to be put on display, telling the whole world that my lot in life was that of an indentured servant, making $9 an hour to pack your iPad, for a glimmering tip of $5.

I wouldn't be interested in sitting for a professional user profile photo, or a standardized mandatory snapshot. I wouldn't smile for the photo on my ID badge. I wouldn't be interested in having candid photos of me snapped on the factory floor, while my manager, zippy the pinhead, brow-beats me, because I express obvious disinterest in a mundane, repetitive, soul crushing job.

I wouldn't put up a Facebook profile proclaiming that I work at McDonald's. Similarly, if McDonald's had it's own corporate social network at mcdonalds.com, where all the pages are themed in red and yellow, with your choice of one of three background images (french fries, a Big Mac or Ronald himself), and everyone wear's a visor or a hair net in their profile picture, it wouldn't be a social network I'd be interested in participating in. Not even for tips. It would feel a little bit like pan handling for spare change. There's a line of dignity I'm not interested in crossing, when it come to social websites.

When I drop change in the tip cup, as I pick up my morning coffee, it's a token of appreciation that goes untaxed, and unrecorded on a server. That's the way tips are supposed to work. A surreptitious reward as acknowlegement for the indignity of servitude.

I agree. In that scenario, I feel absolutely no need for restraint in attacking someone else's encrypted information. Namely, when that someone else is an uninvited eavesdropper.

I refuse to tolerate the idea of placing a high-powered machine in my living room, if that machine won't tell me what it's doing or who it's talking to. In that moment I feel completely justified in my attempts to break encryption, read the information collected about me, and reverse engineer or destroy the device.

This is an aspect that OP's article doesn't cover: Consumer products bundled with mandated encryption that operates against the interest of the end user, with designs to eavesdrop on the user simply to capture their ambient behavior as a rule, and disinform the user of the information collected about them, whether it be accelerometer information, GPS information, or channel changing habits.

This is the inverse of Phil Zimmerman's goal. Pervasive, continuous observation and telemetry, especially that which occurs without the consent or awareness of the observed.

Yeah, Phil Zimmerman's article mostly addresses intercepting vulnerable transmissions over a wire or through the air waves.

Not so much about breaking encryption, and attacking a static target.

I think Phil Zimmerman's assumption (at least, withing the context of this article) is that if you're attacking an sample of encrypted information, that act alone comes with the implicit understanding that you're probably acting against the interests of the person who locked the information away in the first place. Whether that person or group of people are worthy of the attack is its own judgement call.

Both are intended for controlled distribution.

I expect my doctor and the testing center to control the dissemination of my protected healthcare information.

The production company and the TV station expect its viewers to contol the dissemination of their artistic works.

Is one expectation less reasonable than the other?

I know that DRM isn't explicitly defined as encryption, but encryption is usually the apparatus that achieves the goal of DRM. In most modern situations DRM schemes involve carefully implemented encryption.

But ultimately, the content is being defended with encryption.

If there's a dossier in an office somewhere, because I visited a doctor, I would want the clerks charged with handling that dossier to exert control over it. If they're saving it to disk on a server in a basement IT closet, I'd want it encrypted.

Meanwhile, if I was an employee at a production company, producing a television episode, I'd probably be expected to exert the same degree of control over the fragments of unfinished content, as they trickle in from the soundstage and are finished up in post production, but then, they undergo a different type of encryption, when locked up in DRM for release to paying subscribers.

The question is more an ethical one, not a technical one.

If we have encryption as a tool we might use, when is its use respectable, and when is its defeat admirable, and why? Why is it cool when we crack DVDCSS, but awful when the NSA breaks into Google and bypasses their SSL firewall? Are we just hypocrites who want to have their cake and eat it too, or is there an appreciable measure of difference between the two?

So, no one ever dares to ask this, but I'm going to because I never see mention of it crop up in these sorts of discussions.

Where do you draw the line between an individual's assertion of privacy over confidential information, and contrast it with the premise of intellectual property and the use of encryption to achieve goals traditionally perceived as less noble, such as DRM?

Where does the distinction emerge, that my social security number and HIV status deserve protection, but an episode of Game of Thrones does not?

I'm not asking this question because I don't understand the distinction. I'm asking this question because it's not often discussed.

If information wants to be free, then what is our objective measure, to define the reason why we might choose to confine some, all or none of our information, especially when employing encryption?