fixermark

That breaks down fast when the pickpocketing victim reports their phone stolen. Police have retrieved stolen phones via the pickpocketing victim running "find my phone" on their property when they realize it is gone.

No, the error was mine. I zoned out on details because I misinterpreted your earlier sentence and assumed the remainder of the post was poor justification of my misunderstanding of your thesis.

I don't mean a miss, I mean "This phone breezes through the dragnet but is clearly moving the wrong way to be associated with the crime in question, so we can discard this suspect."

That'll be great news for the suspect in question if it's the black guy the cops picked up using "traditional" policing methods because he looks like he was in the wrong neighborhood.

Ah, my mistake---you wrote "all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are not legal" and I think you meant it as "not all methods of gathering evidence from a group of innocent people are legal". English needs parenthetical binding. ;)

Correct. It's best modeled by neither 1984 or Brave New World---It's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

People get the basics that there are breakdowns in the system of safeguards and a non-zero chance that they'll be the victim of a crime or injustice facilitated by ubiquitous observation. But relative to the benefits, the odds they'll be the one locked in the dungeon suffering are so low that they'll readily shoulder that risk for the observed, immediate, and obvious benefits.

This feels like a method of catching criminals that criminals will rapidly adapt to avoiding. "Don't carry the thing that broadcasts your location at all times while you're committing a home invasion" seems like a pretty obvious thing to avoid once a threat model is understood.

Regardless of the privacy issues, I don't anticipate this approach will stay useful in the long run.

Ironic choice of examples, because lacking these tools, you've just identified the tool the police tend to fall back on.

We can build algorithms to avoid racial bias, with awareness and effort. How confident are you we can train cops to do the same?

If your train of logic basically reaches the conclusion "police cannot legally investigate crimes," I'm afraid I have some bad news about the facts underpinning your train of logic, because society will not conclude crimes can no longer be investigated.

The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Given that alternatives the police have include "picking up anyone who just looks like they might be a perpetrator" (which all too often translates to racist policing), is there value to communities (especially communities with past racial policing concerns) of tools that tell the cops it's probably not any of the people the system doesn't identify (or identifies as affirmatively not in the area of interest)?

Historically, web specs often start more descriptive than proscriptive. Building a spec without a reference implementation is a great way to build an unimplementable spec.

That seems to add a lot of logic and interaction complexity to work around a problem that is only a problem for people who already have the technical skill to remap 8.8.8.8 to their preferred DNS server anyway.

You are in control of your own network.

Map 8.8.8.8 to the machine of your choosing.

> it can report the problem to the user

How? And what should the user do with that information?

This device is not architected for users who know what DNS, DHCP, or TLS are, much less who care.

I know, and yes, it was intended to be sarcastic. ;)

He of all people should understand that the practical implementation of DNS and DHCP has become so broken by bad-acting ISPs that consumer electronics devices end up side-stepping the spec entirely so the thing works for the common consumer user.

How is "hardcoding 8.8.8.8" a "massive amount of trouble?"

Or to speed up the Internet experience.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-p...

That's the issue though---there was already an arms race (between users and ISPs), and it was making it hard to create reliable consumer electronics devices because DNS logic is complicated and the complexity adds cost (and more importantly, pushes configuration burden from the device onto the user).

It sucks that customization was damaged in the arms race, but that's the nature of measure-countermeasure in web technologies across the board. Every web technology is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intention behind the spec, and the real-world implementation of the spec.

DNS / DHCP implementation drifted from intention years ago.

Have you verified you can't cast your own local content if 8.8.8.8 is down? I thought it did a fallback.

I don't think it prevents streaming from a local media server, as that use-case is already supported.

https://allaboutchromecast.com/chromecast-how-to-guide/compa...

That default, sadly, would basically guarantee the thing doesn't work for all too many users. And as a consumer electronics product (especially in the sub-$50 price-range), the market-smart thing to do is configure the defaults to work in the saddle-point of worst-case and common scenario (i.e. badly-configured local router talking to a standards-hostile ISP's DHCP configurations).

If you're savvy enough to configure your own DNS server, you're probably savvy enough to modify ip table resolution.

This guy sure is angry that his consumer electronics device is architected to be maximally convenient to set-up and use for the common user.

He may want to consider an alternative product. Or use his 1337 hacker skills to modify his already-customized local routing configuration to just do the thing this consumer electronics device is assuming is standard (i.e. accessing services by IP on the Internet) by telling his network to proxy 8.8.8.8 to some other IP he designates.

Probably zero; NYC is very good about generating its own businesses from the population. It's a big city with a pile of opportunity.

The thing is, you can substitute "politics" for "people" and get the same statement, which is why NASA's political work is at least as important to human space exploration (and, I would argue, long-term species survival) as the raw scientific work.

People have to be continually convinced that exploration of the solar system is a worthwhile expenditure of a lot of money that could be spent on other things. Seems obvious to those who are already thinking in the direction of where humanity is going, but most people do not.

What is going on within the pricing scheme for flights that longer, ostensibly more costly-to-run flights are so much cheaper than alternatives that skip-lagging makes sense? Are airlines using multi-hop routes as loss leaders of some kind?

If so, no reason they shouldn't be the ones eating the cost when the customer calls their bluff.

The state already has extremely heavy involvement in management of the telephone system. There is plenty of precedent for this being generally benevolent authority.

Based on the article title ("Why no one really quits Google or Facebook"), your experience doesn't align with the scenario the article is talking about; it's scoped to people who already adopted these service ecosystems.

I believe this article mentions that the ecosystems are hard to switch away from once adopted.

Part of the issue the article notes is: once you start with Google (or any large, interconnected service ecosystem), there's quite a bit of activation-energy cost to leaving it.

Consider Drive as an example. You can download the entire contents of your Drive at any time. Where do you upload it to? How many services will provide a clean and easy way to import all Drive documents? Will they maintain folder hierarchy? Individual files in Drive can also be shared with zero, a few, or all users with a given URL---can your new collaborative document editing tool be set up to manage that state? Is it automatable, or something you'll have to set up by hand for 10s - 100s - 1000s of documents?

This is the kind of thing an enterprise can pay someone to sort out, but individual users really have to care about leaving a service family (that one assumes at some point in the past they were already happy with the privacy / security tradeoff) to invest the time and effort to do so without data or functionality loss.

It's a reasonable space to have disagreement in, which is why US and EU law differs here.