One would sort of expect the NSA to be able to get ahold of the weights and have the budget for a few graphics cards.
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(Title of this post changed due to length constraints, original was "BEREC: Open Internet Regulation is not an obstacle in implementing EU sanctions to block RT and Sputnik")
> War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces.
When you describe what the rest of us would call 'poor relations' as war, it raises the question of what you call it when thousands are drafted and brutally slaughtered. If this also is to be called 'war', then it raises the question: if you're already at war with them, what difference does it make if you decide to draft a few million young men and send them over there? Or for that matter a few strategic offensive weapons (colloquially known as nukes)?
Alternatively, you may contend that what everyone else calls "war" you call, let's say, "war 2". But in that case, your definition is unique to you, and is not terribly useful for communicating with other people.
The entire point of a free country is that people can handle the information. If not, why even bother?
From the economic point, the fragmentation of streaming services will probably give it a resurgence.
1. RT does provide a view, and I would like to hear it, thanks. 2. Who decides what are the "actual news reports"? Who decides that RT is not "valid"?
Tor operators can see the IP, they can see the DNS, and their operation has the effect of unblocking RT.
How are you to get on the Tor network?
According to EU officials, it does not.
I've sent out some e-mails, if what you say is true I will amend it.
Re: "knowingly and intentionally," I will repost my comment <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30537459>:
> "Knowingly and intentionally" seems to apply to the operation (e.g. "you know that you're running a Tor node") - "circumvention" is on the basis of "object or effect". (For ESL speakers: "object" means "goal", "effect" means "result", and Tor obviously has a final, de-facto result of unblocking RT)
No, but I am aware of this, I even thought to mention it, and I sorely hope that I am proven wrong. However, my concern is that the ban explicitly does apply to the medium itself.
In particular, article 12 bans participation in "activities the object or effect of which is to circumvent prohibitions". Can you think of any reason for why Tor would not be considered to circumvent the ban?
Most of the crap on Google is going to be monetized sites. If you just block/downrank all the sites with e.g. ads, then the profit motive for spam goes down - the more value you extract, the less value you are able to extract.
I mean, yes, that's true, but it's still a bad idea.
> Balance between security and usability, as usual. If you want more, use pgp, but loose most users.
They could just have a local client. Thunderbird/Outlook/whatever isn't exactly difficult to use, even for non-technical people.
Whether such storage exists is a much better question. I think it depends on what you want to do with it. For example, if the Bitfinex guys were ideologically motivated, they could've spent all the money on, I don't know, political ads or whatever. More generally, I think you can certainly come up with storage that is outside the reach of a given threat actor in pursuit of a given goal.
Try running Thunderbird or a similar client locally, and use PGP (ugh) or something similar to encrypt messages.
(Theoretically, you can also use PGP with webmail, and it's secure, but extremely unpleasant.)
Of course not, but it is possible to do so. It can also be verified by trusted third parties, etc.
> However, I believe that most people use protonmail for convenience and that it fits the threat model of the average joe. If you're getting targeted by the NSA, you shouldn't use a browser with JIT enabled anyway.
This is a non-sequitur. If you're starting to talk about average Joes with an unspecified threat model, surely GMail will be fine too, for some very low bar of "crooks can't hack my facebook". But there's obviously a big span inbetween that and "specifically targeted by intelligence agencies".
More to the point, no matter your threat model, you should try not to do business with scammers. Firstly, out of moral imperative, and secondly, because your threat model might change.
1. Storage
2. Payment rail
If your storage is solid (e.g. keys in brain wallet, account in crooked bank, money in shoebox) and the payment rail is solid (e.g. gold, cryptocurrency, cash), you're good. (To clarify, "solid" here means "beyond the legal-regulatory system", which means the rules aren't trumped.) Otherwise, you aren't.
I say that Bitcoin has "finality," because it does the job of payment rail with 100% irreversibility.
Grant that Bitcoin is a mediocre storage (1). But the payment rail (2) truly is irreversible. The combined system of two disjoint parts, built out of bitcoin-as-storage and bitcoin-as-payment-rail, is not.
In particular, Bitcoin mining is concentrated into a small number of pools, but the amount of actual power they hold is very questionable. Because nobody censors transactions, we can't know if miners would flee or not if they began to.
English banknotes are printed by De La Rue plc, but it's not like they have a stranglehold on the English economy. If they began to act up, their 'power' would dry up very quickly.
Also, even with 100% of miners cooperating, reversing a two week old transaction would still take two weeks. There are some technical issues with this, since new transaction would grind to a halt and it would generally be a mess.
Note how Ethereum wasn't miners collaborating (soft fork), it was a hard fork, which required no miner cooperation at all.
A hard fork of Bitcoin in this way is indeed possible, but would require the consent of a lot of entities. Ethereum is much more 'socially' centralized in terms of its governance process, and it was very obvious that if they didn't go along with it, then the big, centralized entity that held all the proceeds from the ICO would stop paying the developers, and the PR goons, and and and...
I'm not going to draw any conclusions about the future based on this, but we can observe that big players (Binance) have lost money, publicly considered 51% attacks, then backed down. We can also observe the fate of Marathon's OFAC pool - he didn't fly so good, who wants to try next?
Agreed.
> That's a trade off of convenience vs. risk, but doesn't change the fundamentals.
There is. The ones that rely on court mechanisms aren't the payment mechanism being reversible, it's something else (the storage) that gives first.
It's true that if you keep it in your bank account, all transactions are reversible. But that's a statement about property rights, not about finality. If I have a solid means of "storing" my money, such as by burying it in my back yard, then the payment itself is irreversible. That's not true for cards, which are reversible even if your storage is 100% robust.
For example, if I keep all my money in the bank, then cash is only as reversible as my bank account is solid. But "cash as a payment method is reversible, if you store the proceeds in a bank account" is not a statement that tells you anything about cash, it's a statement about my bank account.
It would be a solid article if it attempted to argue the point it proves, which is that "there is no such thing as unseizable". But it doesn't, so it isn't.