> When the Australian minister for communication introduced record keeping laws for ISPs he encouraged people to bypass it using VPNs. Said thats what he was doing.
Do you have a source for that? If true I find it very bizarre.
> “If on the other hand I communicate with you via Skype for a voice call or Viber, send you a message on WhatsApp or Wickr or Threema or Signal or Telegrammer — there’s a gazillion of them — or indeed if you make a FaceTime call, then all that the telco can see, insofar as it can see anything, is that my device has had a connection with the Skype server or the WhatsApp server; it doesn’t see anything happening with you.
> “There are always ways for people to get around things, but of course a lot of people don’t, and that’s why I’ve always said the data retention laws, the use of metadata, is not a silver bullet. It’s not a 100% guarantee. It is one tool in many tools.”
This is correct. Every serious criminal won't use a VPN or other obvious crypto, because this paints a big target on your back signalling you want to hide something. A serious adversary will, as you say, use a pre-arranged innocent vocabulary that is virtually impossible to detect, or just communicate face-to-face or via written notes delivered by a messenger.
Oh and by the way, remember to buy lettuce today ;) ;)
'Apparently' how? Because you're being downvoted? I doubt, even if it is a sockpuppet account (which incidentally has amassed four times the karma you have), that they are the only one downvoting you.
He's saying that because the person who says they've been here for 8 years registered 16 days ago. As if, in 8 years of Inflammatory HN commentary, only just now did they decide to stop lurking. And only just now did they become so vocal about what matters to them.
That's my interpretation. It could also mean the more obvious, "I've been here for 8 years but under a different name."
> It could also mean the more obvious, "I've been here for 8 years but under a different name."
Bingo. Why didn't you start with the more obvious interpretation?
I've been here in my estimation for 7-8 years, with maybe the first 2 years of that being lurking. Check that 4 year old 'ledge' account too and you'll see that all the facts and stylometric features line up.
When the 'submitting too fast' limitation (which ironically is because you people were downvoting me) is lifted on my current account, I'll be happy to angrily post from there again too.
And I'm not using any of these other accounts to downvote anyone, or do anything deceptive. But how else could I prove that my current account being 16 days old is meaningless? I have made probably 30+ accounts on HN, and I wish I could find one of the 5-6 year old ones and log into it to really drive it home that you're wrong.
Sexual selection for traits that otherwise have no discernible survival benefit or even harm survival happens all over the animal kingdom. Selection for bravery/aggression/dominance at least has the potential benefit of defense. Calling this sort of selection 'manipulation' on the part of female monkeys is making an unwarranted and human biased value judgement.
In the animal kingdom you have uncommon scenarios such as seahorses where the male caries the fertilized eggs or spiders where many times the male is just eaten by the female.
If he means that human females evolved to extract resources from males it is also reductionist. Females were not hunters, but they were harvesters and growers.
I think he is implying that females could not get resources because they took care of the offspring and the male got them. This is also wrong, evidence of early human settlements point that females took care of the offspring while harvesting and growing crops.
You are implying that we mostly evolved eating meat, which is wrong. We evolved being omnivores and we ate everything we could get, mussels, large insects, fruit, tubercules... Make no mistake, humans were hunters but that was only one part of the picture.
I think you are mixing two different (although very related) terms.
We did evolve by eating meat. The archeological and even biological evidence for that is quite strong. Eating meat (more specifically fish) allowed for the necessary proteins for brain increase.
But we seem to have evolved to eat as much as possible, thereby, we evolved to be omnivorous.
The difference here is between by what diet we did evolve and to what diet we evolved to. But the by part is purely biological in nature, the to part is also a sociologic one, since it depends, amongst other factors, on the use of fire to cook.
I made the original comment in this thread, let me attempt to clarify.
The person you replied to thought that I was referring to humans exclusively (Close enough, I had not only humans but most primates in mind), while a comment above that level the person thought that I was referring very broadly to animal kingdom.
In which sense is this "obvious", hubert123? I am really interested in what the comment meant by "restricted to humans". Try to be explicit in explaining.
"What I saw in his face was just defiance. He was not going to testify in this double homicide case because he wasn't going to testify. That's all there was to it. So I saw pure scorn for the judicial system in the defendant's face."
Because the judge didn't like his face he gets 20 years for contempt.
* Civil forfeiture. The state can just de facto steal every single item those people have and leave them unable to fight that in court (not that it would make much difference)
* Involuntary commitment. They can just be committed into a psychiatric institution where they can be drugged against their will and even tortured. This can be extended to an arbitrarily long period of time
* They can have their children taken away
* IRS can just accuse them of an astronomical tax debt, take all of their possessions and leave them effectively unable to get legal representation (not that it would make much difference)
#"Illegal":
* Just detain them in a secret facility and do with them as they dam well please
TLDR: The state does with you what it damn well pleases and there's nothing you can really do about it. Granted this usually doesn't happen but that's just because the stakes usually aren't that high.
Yes, a judge could hold them in contempt and jail them for some time. That's the only legal option.
It's possible they could seize some assets as part of the contempt charge, but there are already plenty of legal groups that would jump at the opportunity to represent them pro bono.
The other suggestions you offer are, to be blunt, those of a conspiracy nut.
For the time limit, yes and no. Jailing someone who is held in contempt is done as a coercive measure. If the need for the person to do something passes, they can't continue to be held. Could they theoretically be held for 20 years? Sure. But that type of action is extremely rare and isn't likely to happen here.
The FBI can't take away the person's children. --Even if he's put in jail, the other parent would retain custody. The FBI would have to convince social services to remove the children from the home, and family court judges aren't overly likely to go along with that.
The FBI could potentially convince a psychiatrist to have a person involuntarily committed for a short time for observation, but they can't force any doctor or hospital to put the people on drugs or otherwise force some form of treatment on them if there's not diagnosis of mental illness.
The FBI doesn't get to tell the IRS to make claims about a person owing an astronomical sum. I suppose they could fabricate evidence and give it to the IRS, but then the individuals responsible would be performing illegal actions and risk being sent to prison themselves. Most members of the law enforcement community are decent people and aren't willing to do that type of stuff.
> But that type of action is extremely rare and isn't likely to happen here.
Given the importance of the situation it seems it is very likely it is going to happen just here. It's up to the judge(s).
>and family court judges aren't overly likely to go along with that.
It's up to the judge(s).
>The FBI could potentially convince a psychiatrist...
This is just redirecting pressure to a different person, keep doing it until you find that someone who will buckle.
> Most members of the law enforcement community are decent people and aren't willing to do that type of stuff.
Just like above, most are honest, but you only need one that isn't.
If you think all of those are impossible by the US government, take a look at you know where, where torture doesn't happen, and no-one was prosecuted for torture that didn't happen.
Exactly, it's this kind of nuance people so often miss.
Black and white thinking. The government does something you disagree with, so suddenly now it's natural to expect them to wield literally every tool of state power against you to make that happen.
The government, after all, is not a singular entity. Its made up of many checks and balances and institutions that often act in disagreement with one another.
It is legal to accuse someone of an astronomical tax debt and take their assets, I do not believe it would be considered legal for the IRS to make that accusation without papers showing the work they used to arrive at the accusation, and it would not be considered a valid chain of reasoning 'because the FBI asked us to'.
This, and other techniques you describe, have been used by the FBI in the past but as far as I know only against the relatively powerless. It seems silly to think the FBI would do it in this case.
If the FBI started doing that to employees or ex-employees I suspect Apple would leave the U.S.
This is spot on, and this is why bulk surveillance is so dangerous. It would not surprise me to know that the FBI has already started following/spying, and tasked the NSA to electronically monitor key Apple representatives and their lawyers. If they can find anything shady, they can then use that of individuals to try and use that as leverage.
The key point here is that if the USG find a way to force Apple and Apple engineers to do this work then the government, by default, they must have too much power.
Oh please. He did something wrong under Swedish law. That's pretty obvious. Of course he is still there in his little room because of dirty politics. I am sure he would have taken a fine or whatever in Sweden if he were not afraid of being extradited to the US.
If that were actually implementable against large powerful corporations universally, we would not have had a bailout after the derivatives bomb. As it is, not even the ratings agencies got nicked.
Everything that relates to outlier characteristics will disproportionately affect more boys than girls. The more extreme the outlier the much more likely it will be a boy.
This is just basic human biology that like the GP mentioned is routinely deliberately ignored by feminism.
I think the GP is referring to differences in standard deviation, not mean, which causes the larger-deviation population to dominate at both the left and right tails.
I'm not saying the theory is right or wrong, only that people seem to have a much harder time understanding a theory based off of same means but different standard deviations than a theory based off of different means.
Do you have a source for that? If true I find it very bizarre.