Also, if you are outside of the USA, you're pretty much fucked as the NSA sees everything you do, including the dicks and vaginas of all 7 billion non-US citizens. And there is also no chance of that ever changing, since no foreign surveillance program hasn't even entered any debate.
So from here, the non-united states to you, dear US reader: here's 7 billion people pointing their fingers at you, you peeping toms, you creeps.
Another company owns the redistribution rights for the UK and the AU, and that company has decided not to allow it on YouTube until a point in the future.
IIRC from other YouTube comments, there's a 2 week delay.
Kind of stupid in a global era, but that's what big corporations do.
The show is on in the UK tonight; from what I remember previously, the videos are opened up for the UK from that point. Not the worst thing in the world, restricting YouTube videos until they've had a chance to show the full episode in said country. It's not like this is just a clip - it's a whole segment of the show.
It just feels like what footballer fan (soccer you,yanks) would feel if they had to wait over 24 hours to watch a world cup match .... most would just find another way to watch it.
iTunes 10.7 user here (the last version before that crappy redesign). iTunes 10.7 is now 2.5 years old. Since yesterday I cannot access my iTunes account details anymore. App just keeps asking for my password again and again.
Don't expect your watch to have support for more than 2 years.
Imho beats headphones don't sound good. The bass is ridiculously overpowered and distorts nearly constantly.
Now, tastes are different, and you might want exactly this experience with that distorted bass.
If you create both the music and the speaker, like Dre does, and you wanted that experience, the right approach would have been to add such a distorted bass to your track during mixing/mastering, and then create headphones that faithfully output this signal.
This would ensure that you could enjoy Dre's tracks with that distorted bass on all your music equipment, like with your home hifi system, and if you used the beats headphones with other music, it would also output that other music truthfully.
So it becomes a bit of a standards issue. It's as if a very popular computer displays brand made displays where pixels that are 100% white will flicker wildly, but the displays brand was created by a guy known for his lowpoly wireframe art style, and this particular style looks great on those displays. So that combination might be fine, but you cannot use the displays to faithfully assess other images, really.
Yeah, I really concur with the sound quality argument. I got a pair of Beats on the cheap from a friend, but I got tired of wearing them after awhile and eventually switched to earbuds to just listening to my music cause of the sound quality. Ordered a pair of Sennheiser Momentums though, should be getting those by Saturday, so I'm hoping to return to a solid pair of over-ear headphones again.
Why is a mix of the songs (with extra bass) less "truthful" than the mix made by the record company employee? Both are valid interpretations of the music. If you prefer the former, why shouldn't you listen to it?
Oh you can listen to anything you like. Any mix is fine, and any headphones are fine.
When I say truthfulness, I refer to playback equipment. Truthful means that it outputs something that is close to the input.
My argument is that if a headphone doesn't add deliberate distortions, it can be used for all kinds of music, enhancing its utility. And at the same time, with such a more useful headphone, you can still have the same experience as before, if those distortions are added at an earlier time.
History has shown that if you join an intelligence service, you basically forfeit your right to a fair trial if anything ever goes wrong.
Your potential future opponent can make anything secret and off-bounds that you want to present in court, has unlimited funds and no qualms to invade your private life and present anything bad about you, has unlimited funds to haunt you for the rest of your life, and has no conscience except to preserve itself, even if it was in the wrong. I've also got a hunch that their culture is not "let's all chill and find the truth" but has more of a clan-like "you're either with us or against us" vibe. And this organization has guns, lots of guns.
So in effect, it's a bit like joining the Mafia.
Considering this, one has to wonder why anybody would ever join such a service.
I'm not well educated in this regard, but my general understanding is that such agencies tend to protect their own. Police men will protect other police men. The CIA will protect employees against crimes they may have committed.
In general, you're only going to have a problem like this if you do something to piss off the rest of your organization. But as long as you conform they are more likely to protect you than turn against you.
Don't snitch. Give unconditional respect to everyone that's a made man or higher in the organization. Follow orders. Don't snitch. Pay your superior their cut of your business. Don't step on anyone else's toes [without getting permission first]. Don't snitch.
The unwritten rules for any corrupt organization are pretty simple. "Keep your mouth shut," is always one of them, and possibly the only unforgivable offense.
What makes this particularly bad for iOS users is the fact that you cannot delete a wifi connection if you're not there. The interface just doesn't show all your previously authenticated networks.
So imagine that you travel, go to a few hotels and use their wifi networks. Once you're back home, the fact that you used these networks is still broadcast everywhere, and there is no way in the interface to turn that off.
This is especially frustrating as a transit user whose bus goes by multiple Starbucks/local cafe chains. Even at 40 km/h, that's enough time for my phone to say 'WIFI NETWORK MUST HAVE', which results in my internet suddenly not working anymore until I figure it out and turn WiFi off entirely, forget the network (if it doesn't disconnect before I can get at it), or just finish an article while it times out.
Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.
Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it.
> Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.
I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.
He hired CIs posing as hitmen a few times. His diary/movie script/fictional book on his laptop they found claimed he tried to kill an employee who had potential to snitch, and a scammer in Canada that ripped off many users.
He also agreed to a higher price for the "hit" in Canada, as it was claimed by the CI the target lived with 3 other people and if they were to collect all his assets as ordered then everybody would have to die. Ross was totally cool with that and paid.
I also don't think this is why his fanbase on SR dumped him, they seemed more pissed that his security practices were so terribad awful it put everybody else in jeopardy. It's almost as if he read his own forum's security base and then did the opposite of what everybody said not to do like "Never order fake ID to where you live" and "Don't sit in a cafe ordering drugs off this site" (don't sit in a cafe/library and run the site either).
The money he paid to kill non existent people was way more than what they caused him to lose through scamming, he could have paid back the losses out of pocket with his huge stash of bitcoins instead of seeking vengeance. He acted exactly like a boss of a gangster dial a dope operation that orders the hit of one of their drivers they think is ripping them off.
Got a link for the claims in those first two paragraphs for us? Because if that is true, it changes a whole bunch of things, including the argument about entrapment I made in a sibling thread.
It's a rather different thing if they entrap him with a tough moral dilemma than entrapping him with simply ordering a hit on people when it's not the only alternative to a whole bunch of other people having their lives destroyed, including targeting 3 people that just happen to live there.
SO, in his line of business, what would be the 'good thing to do, when someone blackmail your whole customer base ? Sue ?
Sadly, due to the prohibition, hitmen and violence are the only way for people like Ulbricht to deal with such issues.
> > Oh c'mon, he ordered a hitman inside a play the FBI fully staged for him. There was never any harm done to anybody.
> I'm not sure this line of reasoning makes a lot of difference. We judge criminal intent, not simply outcome, and it's pretty clear that the intent in hiring a hitman is to have someone killed - staged or not. It's surely different from pulling the trigger yourself, but I think it's quite fair to expect a gut-check moment when one decides not to pay for murder, and to hold someone criminally accountable for ignoring that gut-check and deciding to go ahead with the hit anyway.
But the FBI could basically do this to anyone: try and convince them using a play that involves fabricated emotional pressure, blackmail and, if some other comments are correct (I haven't followed the case that closely), even inventing physical danger and multiple other people's lives being on the line.
The FBI could do this to anyone, do you think it's fair or desirable that anyone that could be tricked into agreeing to hire a (fictional) hitman should in fact be charged with that crime and put into jail for the rest of their lives? Because I think that would be a lot of people you'd pre-emptively have to put in jail. Especially if they deliberately put in the classic moral dilemma of saving a whole bunch of people's lives from being destroyed versus killing the single person responsible.
How many people would make the same decision if confronted with this circumstance? Should they all be put in jail, just for the fact that they would've made that choice if it had been real? Because I don't think that's a very good "test" for detecting "bad people" or people that are really dangerous for society. You can argue about the moral choice (since those victims would merely "have their lives ruined", not be actually killed), but as presented I think it's a really difficult dilemma, and I couldn't really fault a person for choosing one way or another. It's a terrible moral dilemma that I personally just hope to never have to face in my life.
So, having argued that any random person who would make this choice is not necessarily so bad they should be convicted, what differentiates Ross Ulbricht? Seems that, in this particular context, his "crime" was that because of his involvements, he was a person likely to actually face this dilemma situation at some point in his Silk Road career. That seems about the only reason to expose Ulbricht to this moral dilemma situation, instead of just any (or every) random person on the streets.
So then, really, is it reasonable to entrap and then convict someone because they are involved in business that may likely at some point in the future lead to a situation where they would have to make choices like these?
To repeat, if the hitman thing had just been about offing a competitor for financial or business gains, my whole argument above doesn't hold. But they actively put him in a situation where there was no moral right answer, and then convicted him for it.
"Roberts was upset that one of his employees—records show these employees were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week—had stolen from Roberts and eventually managed to get himself arrested by dealing with an undercover agent. Roberts wanted the employee tortured so that he would return the missing Bitcoins. Not knowing much about hitmen, Roberts ended up talking to the very undercover agent who had helped bust his employee.
On January 26, 2013, Roberts asked that the former employee get "beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back." A day later, afraid that his former employee would squeal to the police, Roberts asked if it was possible to "change the order to execute rather than torture?" Roberts said he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case." The agent offered to do the job for $80,000."
Pure entrapment. Create a fake simulated decision dilemma he never had to decide in real life, put a lot of emotional pressure on him, and then when he made a bad decision inside this simulation that harmed nobody, try to condemn him for it.
I haven't followed this trial closely enough to know exactly what happened here, but despite the sanctimonious, performative "I'm-a-good-person" denials you're getting in response, entrapment is a real thing. If one's opponent is a pro (this is a lucrative sub-profession of "private investigators") one won't see it coming and will be lucky to avoid it. I'm sure the FBI is also skilled at this technique, which may explain why many PIs are former agents.
A family friend had disappointed some wealthy people by lawfully overcoming a do-not-compete. It didn't happen for years, but eventually she was manipulated into making statements about another person, and of course those statements were taped by the "friendly" person who was "helping" her with a family issue. The swiftness of the DOJ's response could only have been motivated by campaign contributions. And now this person is a felon.
This is a good person, certainly much more "Christian" than I've ever been. Some might say that sort of person is actually easier to entrap, since her emotional levers are more obvious, but I think everyone has levers, often closely related to their own moral codes. Ulbricht's levers were his project and potential threats to that. Of course it would have been wiser for Ulbricht to take a broader view and reject violent suggestions. It isn't the case that mere morality suffices to avoid this trap.
Sure, we could draw the line at allowing law enforcement to kidnap a suspect's family, but should we? To the contrary, I think we've given our employees in law enforcement entirely too much leeway already.
Not necessarily, but when you have a guy who's hiring fake hitmen to punish sellers trying to rip off buyers it's hard to argue that he never would have considered a hitman if not for law enforcement intervention.
The practice of law enforcement officers inducing a person to commit a crime he otherwise would not likely have committed. I have a hard time seeing why my extreme example couldn't be found to be entrapment if any law enforcement official were foolhardy enough to try it.
While the possibility of entrapment certainly adds a bit of grey, I know that I would never consent even under pressure to "ordering a hitman" under anything but the most extraordinary self-defense circumstances. I would never do that just because I didn't like someone or had some kind of disagreement, or even if that person was doing something bad (but not physically threatening) to me. If I found myself in such a conversation I'd just drop it and walk.
The only situation I can imagine where I might consent to this would be if someone were, say, physically threatening myself or my family and I had clear evidence that they intended to follow through -- and no normal civilized legal recourse.
The government guy could have said "Hey look I think this guy is going to go to the feds and we're all going to go to jail! Give me the money and I'll take care of this problem. If you don't, I'm going to come after you because I'm not going to go to jail for this."
At that point, a person might not feel that they have any choice. And the government gets to claim that "he ordered a hit"
That's a terrible argument. Imagine you just made that threat to me. I will say "No. And if you come after me, I will just turn you in to the feds." And now you're almost assuredly going to jail, which is what you were trying to avoid in the first place. This is a quick way to stick yourself in an impossible-to-win situation and violate everyone's trust.
Anyway, the 'government guy' happened to keep records of what was said, so I don't see why you'd be tied up on such a hypothetical. And Ulbricht could have argued entrapment in court, if that was contested dialog.
> "No. And if you come after me, I will just turn you in to the feds."
Ok so you're going to turn the other guy in to the feds for what exactly? How do you know this other guy? Why would him turning you in to the feds be a problem, unless you're doing something illegal?
DPR: He this guy is doing something bad, arrest him!
Feds: How do you know he's doing something bad?
DPR: Well I run the Silk Road and he told me that if we didn't do something about this other guy, that HE was going to turn us in to you!
Feds: Oh, okay well now you're definitely going to jail.
So your clever arrangement whereby you're going to use the feds to get the guy threatening you to go to jail has now fallen flat on its face, because now you're both going to jail. Which is the thing that you were both trying to avoid in the first place.
Why is the drug trade so violent? Because it exists outside the law and thus there's no one to arbitrate disputes (legally) and so people have to find their own resolution. Hence killing.
It's not a clever argument, it's just the better of two options. If we are killing the guy because he might turn us in, then I should also just kill you because you've threatened to turn me in. There is no way that is a winning proposition for anybody, so it doesn't guarantee any safety for anyone.
If you're willing to kill someone to avoid jail, you better believe I would be willing to turn you in if you've already decided to turn me in because I don't want to kill someone. If we DO kill them, then by the same logic, I should have you killed to.
Threatening the person you are working with to "deal with threats" is just stupid. It just means you have to be dealt with as well.
I'm sorry, but that idea that because it exists outside the law, people can't settle disputes with anything other than murder is complete horseshit. They choose to employ violence, and as such, they are completely and 100% responsible for their actions.
> I'm sorry, but that idea that because it exists outside the law, people can't settle disputes with anything other than murder is complete horseshit.
Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. I'm not saying violence in the ONLY answer, but it's definitely the only one that I can think of that doesn't involve them going to jail.
They can't sue because the thing under dispute is an ill-gotten-gain and thus the court wouldn't adjudicate the issue that is for them at hand but instead put them both in jail for stealing.
What are their other choices? Just suck it up and deal with the fact that they got screwed? Sure, but then the next time a robbery comes around, everyone knows that they can screw you and you'll just suck it up. Yay, free labor! That won't end badly for you will it?
Maybe they can pre-negotiate a contract that specifies how a certain sum of money will be distributed but which doesn't specify how it comes to be? Why would a law-abiding person write such a contract? Take them to court and you might win, but the police might investigate and again you're both in jail.
I'm not saying that there is no possible alternative ever, but your simply asserting that something is true and then providing absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back up that claim isn't terribly convincing.
> Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts.
They don't, but that's their own fault. If your life of crime has forced you into such a predicament that murder-for-hire is a more viable option than dealing with the authorities, you only have yourself to blame. The reason that crime pays so well is because criminals take advantage of opportunities that the rest of society agrees to abstain from for the sake of maintaining order and mutual security; if you decide to exploit those opportunities for the sake of enriching yourself, you shouldn't expect society to feel any sympathy for the fact that you one day felt forced to employ violence in order to protect your criminal investments.
But marijuana is now straight up legal with similar restrictions and regulations as alcohol in several states. And it seems like there's serious momentum to legalize in the rest of them.
I doubt we're going to see radical legalization where the drug war completely ends in the next 5-10 years but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened well within my lifetime.
"Life of crime" can have a highly temporal definition and thus introduce far, far more grey area than you're letting on by your very binary assertions.
"Please explain to me how two criminals who have some sort of dispute -- like say how to disburse the proceeds from a robbery -- have any recourse through the courts. "
I never said they had recourse through the courts. I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence. If they choose to resort to violence, that's entirely their fault, and no one else can be blamed for that.
According to that logic we don't need courts, police, government, etc at all. I think it's a great idea, but practically speaking it's not awesome.
I like the idea of a microkernel government better than the monolithic thing that we currently have, where you can subscribe to police and fire and whatever. I'd prefer that the government mostly provide courts and a system by which other areas of natural monopoly are better managed (like roads, utilities, etc). But to suggest that we don't need a government at all is pretty radical.
If you can't see that "I said they're adults, and are perfectly capable of settling disputes among themselves without resorting to violence" leads DIRECTLY to the government isn't really necessary, then I don't know what to say.
I'm not saying anything like that at all. And I do not respect any argument that mentions the "monopoly on violence" bullcrap.
These people made their choices. They decided, of their own free will, to become involved in something they knew to be highly illegal. Everything that follows is their fault, and their fault alone. Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
Even Candidate Obama (now President Obama) acknowledges that the state is the institution which has a monopoly on violence. To try and dispute this is akin to arguing that they sky in not in fact blue.
> Saying that because these things are illegal means they have to resort to violence is to give them a free pass, and absolve them of their own responsibility.
Not at all! I merely show that a NECESSARY result of disenfranchising people who want to engage in a particular kind of trade which the government deems "wrong" (in the legal sense, because the government can't really determine morality) is that there are very predictable, unfortunate outcomes like this. The whole drug trade is absolutely RIFE with violence because people have no alternative to settle their disputes. I'm not saying that they are guiltless; far from it! But a modicum of thought makes it plain that the violence is due to the illegal nature of what they're doing.
Look at all the other industries that manage to grow things, distribute them, and eventually sell them directly to customers. Coffee, fruit, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc. All these industries have rates of violence which are very close approximations to ZERO. What is different about drugs? Two things:
1. They get you high (but so does coffee, sugar, etc)
2. They're illegal
Obviously I can't PROVE the causality is from 2 rather than 1, but I think a reasonable person could make a reasonable assumption that 2 is far, far more likely than 1.
Ross Ulbricht believed harm had come to the people he'd ordered gangland executions against.
There were plenty of opportunity to come forwards and say: "Hey, I've done an incredibly bad act; here's everything I know about the people I talked to."
Obviously, doing so wouldn't end well for him; it would show some moral standing, however.
The only person responsible for these choices is Ross Ulbricht.
I disagree. A person that doesn't want to harm anyone wouldn't hire (or attempt to hire) a hitman. If the agent would have been a hitman, someone might be dead.
"he never had to decide in real life"
The reason he got in trouble was because he did decide it in real life. It's not like he put a hit out on a World of Warcraft character.
"put a lot of emotional pressure on him"
Emotional pressure? really? That's an elegant way of putting it.
"He hasn't lost my goodwill yet."
It's only because you support the legalization of drugs and you are letting this cloud your judgement. He is an asshole and deserves to do some jail time.
This is similar to would-be terrorists who get honey potted by the fbi. They find people wiling to put bombs in a car and blow up a city block and they sell them the fake bombs/ equipment and then arrest them after they attempt to detonate it, some times not even getting that far.
Conspiracy to traffic narcotics cases are the same. A CI tells a tale of being connected to some cartel and offers to import a bunch of invisible cocaine and if you agree to it and show up with payment you're convicted without any actual drugs existing. The overt act does not even need to be completed, any action done by the accused to further the conspiracy agreement is good enough to get life in prison.
US and UK/Commonwealth countries have similar conspiracy laws where no actual drugs are needed just action on your part to further the conspiracy agreement. A gangster here in Canada actually tried to use a defense that it was his intention to rob the informant peddling invisible drugs, thus never planned to honor the conspiracy agreement as he and his henchmen showed up to the exchange with guns and not money. It didn't work because carrying out the full conspiracy isn't needed you just need any action on your part laid out in the conspiracy agreement and he had rented a truck to carry the large dope shipment as the informant had suggested.
The way I read about it, the FBI arrested one of this employees and made it appear as if that employee took all of his money and did not talk to Ulbricht anymore. Then the FBI created another persona that did talk to him, and waited until his hitman order. It was all part of an elaborate play.
"It's only because you support the legalization of drugs"
In the video you claim that it is "secure". I understand that as "nobody else can see my files or what I do, guaranteed".
Well, you could place a bug between the VNC and the VPS parts. Or your government might force you to do it. How can you reassure me that isn't the case?
We take privacy and security really seriously and have designed the brokering process (the part that connects you to your remote computer) to support this claim by following industry best practices.
We are still in a limited pilot program, but one of primary things we are testing is how to ensure that your computer is not compromised in any way.
We think that if we can achieve the technical goals then arguably, having a remote machine is more secure than one that someone can take from your house/car/etc.
That said, it is a really hard technical problem to manage a computer for someone without having any access to it and that is something we are designing out now.
That comment is really not reassuring.
I'm happy that you take privacy and security very seriously, that's great to hear.
However industry best practices is a little vague and 'to ensure that your computer is not compromised in any way' makes it sound like you want to do the job even the best antiviruses have trouble doing.
Furthermore I'd argue that if someone steals your machine from your house/car/etc, getting the keys to any remote machine should be trivial just by looking at the stored passwords and configuration.
But maybe I misunderstood what you were saying, sorry if that's the case.
'Industry Best Practice' in this case amounts to 'we will hand all of your data over to the government' if required.
Abdicating responsibility for personal security to ANY 3rd party makes one less secure, period.
Now, when the government comes knocking, instead of handing over some files or access records, you'll be able turn over the user entire computer. That's the exact opposite of security to me.
So from here, the non-united states to you, dear US reader: here's 7 billion people pointing their fingers at you, you peeping toms, you creeps.