"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
For some reason, the government did not appear to make the argument invited by the Supreme Court by its rulings in the FedEx and dog-sniff cases. The government could have argued that -- if the EnCase scan for a particular MD5 hash matches -- that the search is constitutionally permissible without a warrant because it revealed nothing except the existence of contraband. And, because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in contraband, the government might argue, a search which only reveals the existence of contraband invades no legitimate privacy right.
In the Crist case, however, the court never addressed that critical issue, because it never had to. The government merely argued that an automated search was no search at all.
This unanswered question -- whether a scan of hash values looking for contraband is a permissible search -- is really the rub.
If the government may conduct warrantless searches as long as they only reveal the presence of contraband, then they could lawfully put automated sniffers on any computer, searching for the presence of files for which the MD5 hash matched that of contraband. While the software categorizing the files might be considered to be conducting a search -- and I think it is -- the contents of this search are not revealed unless the program believes it is contraband.
Acidus:
... ... How did I not see this earlier? Pretty sure this is the same guy writing about how data stored "in the cloud" can be legally searched without a warrant because you have involved a 3rd party who can consent to the search.
And don't think about kiddie porn. Think about the MPAA.
This is a HUGE question that will be one of the defining civil liberties battles of the next decade. I wrote about this case here.
The bottom line becomes, any technology that we can develop to collect information about crimes is A-OK so long as it never provides any information to a human being unless an actual crime has been committed...
Eventually in the distant future, you reach a point... where you've replaced your human police officers with robots... These robots are artificially intelligent and never report the results of their investigations to humans unless a crime has been committed.
Under this analysis I cannot see how the Constitution would prohibit these robots from doing all of the tyrannical things that the 4th amendment was intended to prevent the police from doing, and I don't see how this state of affairs would be materially different from not having any 4th amendment at all.
Therefore, if the 4th amendment is to have any meaning at all, there must be some reason that this kind of automated search is not reasonable.
Scalia offered the following in reference to Caballes: "This is not a new technology. This is a dog." I find that explanation extremely unsatisfying.
Girls hang on Virgil Griffith. This is no exaggeration. At parties, they cling to the arms of the 25-year-old hacker whose reason for being, he says, is to “make the Internet a better and more interesting place.” The founder of a data-mining tool called WikiScanner, Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied. He was once charged, wide-eyed rumor has it, with sedition. No wonder girls whisper secrets in his ear and laugh merrily at his arcane jokes.
Forget 1 hook. Forget 2 hooks. Forget the "hooks in the front" which comes out of left field to make you look silly. Now its all about the Rubik's cube clasp.
China denies hacking into US computers - Yahoo! News
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:11 pm EDT, Jun 12, 2008
China denied accusations by two U.S. lawmakers that it hacked into congressional computers, saying Thursday that as a developing country it wasn't capable of sophisticated cybercrime.
Acidus wrote: Google's new Favicon pisses me off. I'm not sure why. I know this is irrational, but that doesn't make me dislike that lowercase "g" any less.
I strongly second this. For some reason I cannot associate a lower case purple cursive "g" with Google. The result is that I can't find my Google tabs easily anymore. I have to stop and pay attention to the tab bar to find the window I want. I'm sure this will pass as I associate the two concepts in my head, but generally speaking, Boo.
Memestreamer Cyan got $7 million in funding for Zivity!
The site allows both amateur and professional models and photographers to show their stuff. Users vote on those that they like, which channel real dollars to the talent. The more votes, the more money. The basic site is free, but users must pay to vote. About 40% of gross revenue is given directly to the talent. With a recent redesign, the site is focused much more on social networking - users and talent have profile pages and can add each other as friends. They’ve even added a news feed feature that shows who is adding who as friends, and which models users have voted for.
