> May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer than the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.
Why rely on the original publisher? Let me download it and then share it.
I think it's a much simpler requirement that the product be functional without "phoning home" and when the original prosper stops selling it then libraries abd torrents and archive websites step in.
”real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”
To play the devil/right holder's advocate, the next turn in that game is to never "sell" anything, so you won't have "bought" the content nor have any standard codified right to it.
We're already there in many places of course, and many stores have already replaced the "buy" action with more ambiguous wording.
Next turn to that being people turning to the seventh' seas, and then we have again an iTunes Store/Steam moment, and the cycle goes on.
I wonder would it be possible to prosecute bankers under such a law. Is it strictly information, or could you consider actions which undermine faith in the banking sector?
As you astutely note, the company probably has it's "HQ" (for some legal definition of HQ) a mere 30 minutes across Dublin (Luas, walk in rain, bus, more rain) from the Data Protection Commission. It's very likely that whatever big tech data-hoarder you choose has a presence very close to their opposite number in both of these cases.
If it was easier or more cost-effective for these companies not to have a foot in the EU they wouldn't bother, but they do.
Quite right it doesnt absolutely protect your privacy. I'd agree that it's full of holes, but I do think it also contains effective provisions which assist with users controlling their data and data which identifies them.
Which courts are influenced by the EU? I don't think it's true of US courts, and courts in EU nations are supposed to be influenced by it, it's in the EU treaties.
Do you mean to say that Sarbox might preclude this? Or that it should have been banned already? The meaning isn't clear to me and I would be grateful for further explanation.
Don't use them! They cost too much in dollar terms, they all try to EEE lock you in with "managed" (and subtly incompatible) versions of services you would otherwise run yourself. They are too big to give a shit about laws or customer whims.
I have plenty of experience with the big three clouds and given the choice I'll run locally, or on e.g. Hetzner, or not at all.
My company loves to penny-pinch things like lunch reimbursement and necessary tools, but we piss away latge sums on unused or under-used cloud capacity with glee, be ause that is magically billed elsewhere (from the point of view of a given manager).
It's a racket, and I'm by mo means the first to say so. The fact that this money-racket is also a dat-racket doesn't surprise me in the least. It's just good racketeering!
Yes. Cloud is great for a very specific usecase. Venture capital startups which either go viral and explode, or die within a year. In those cases you need the capacity to automatically scale and also to only pay for the resources you actually use so you the service pays for itself. You also have no capex and you can drop the costs instantly if you need to close up shop. For services that really need infinite and instant scaling and flexibility, cloud is a genuinely great option.
However that's not what most traditional companies do. What my employer does, is picking up the physical servers they had in our datacenters, dump them on an AWS compute box they run 24/7 without any kind of orchestration and call it "cloud". That's not what cloud is, that is really just someone else's computer. We spend a LOT more now but our CIO wanted to "go cloud" because everyone is so it was more a tickbox than a real improvement.
> The programming can be set-and-forget, meaning operations can be staged months ahead of deployment and make it difficult to find or prevent.
This is something I haven't considered before. What's the worst case here? Is it feasible for me to go live on a farm in <country I want to harm>, buy a fleet of DJI drones at flea markets etc, stick something harmful to them, then hide them in the woods.
I can move away, wait a year or two, and then have them fly to the nearest metro area and wreak havoc. This seems to be cheap and relatively straightforward, and hard to detect. What am I missing?
In a pre-drone world you can get explosives, divide them into X equal sized packages, add a timer set to the same point in time to each, then travel around the country hiding them in high-traffic areas.
Yes, that approach is inferior to the drone version. You have to hide them inconspicuously, and a bomb sniffing dog could find them. But you can visit a lot of places in a single European country or US state within one day, and unless the country is already on high alert you can hide something for that time span in public. Yet this doesn't happen. Even regular bombings are rare.
The reasons are manifold: In most places getting explosives isn't actually all that easy (unless you go the homemade route) and is a good method to get attention from authorities. But another factor is that there just doesn't seem to be a large interest in doing that kind of complex attack unless there is already an ongoing civil war. Actual terrorism is fairly rare, and the terrorists tend to be not all that sophisticated.
Are these kinds of drone attacks a scary new possibility? Yes, absolutely! Are they likely to happen? Not really. We might see it as a method to assassinate officials (imagine staging drones at a place where you know the US President will hold a speech in a couple months), but I doubt it will play a major role against the general population
The drone scenario is very different, all you have to do is get close-ish to your target. This is very different than having a stick of c4 sit on your target for months. You have to get them to drone-range, say in the back of a lorry, on a roof somewhere, in a box. Then the programming and or AI can kick in and do the last mile for you, whenever you need. Case in point is the Ukrainian attack on the air fields, they parked a lorry nearby.
Attentive people would find the bombs. Especially if they're on alert, which everyone who knows about terrorism will be at least to some degree.
Back in the day, if you forgot a bag on a British bus the driver would get it and run after you, so that it wouldn't be a bomb issue taking the whole day.
Not much. Autonomous targeting and control are quite new and currently take a fair bit of knowledge and skill to get right, but I expect those barriers to lower dramatically in the coming years. There might be power issues with such a long delay, but I'm not sure. I think the main drawback once this tech gets slightly more widespread is that most people who want to terrorize cities don't want to wait a year or two to do it.
For long running conflicts (Israel vs Iran for example) I expect we'll see some fascinating and horrifying attacks in the near to medium term. Of course anti-drone tech is also evolving quickly and I expect that to continue so the shelf life of any specific attack will probably continue to be rather short.
It doesn't really take much knowledge to set up an autonomous drone mission. It's not DJI-levels of consumer friendliness, but I know multiple people that made and fly their own drones, and it's not something you can't do with a few YouTube tutorials.
They're battery operated, so I think there's a time limit of a few months. Then, you want to be very careful with the infrastructure you leave behind (little pop-open doors/roofs for them to fly out of) to avoid future investigation. You're going to need some practice, your first try will just go to shit perhaps. Opsec while you're setting all this up is still a big deal that amateurs will have trouble getting right. But none of these are particularly insurmountable. With the correct software and careful planning, this will succeed at its goals.
Things you can't help: they will discover the remains of the drones, and also their origin. This evidence will eventually lead back to you (unless you have the aid of a enemy nation-state). Not a big deal if you're dying in a suicide attack, but maybe you don't want the extended vacation in the CIA's worst black ops rendition site.
What you're missing is the will to go through with it. Even state actors would get spooked spending months or years setting this up. One slip-up and you're in prison for life. When your country's existence is at stake, the process is easier.
Battery degradation, a year or two's worth of leaves and debris accumulating on and around the drones, literally all of the elements affecting them, animals, etc.
If I've gone to the hassle of setting up a high tech bombing attack, wouldn't I have also gone to the trouble of putting the drone in a self-opening container?
This no longer sounds cheap or relatively straight forward, it sounds more like an engineering challenge the requires technical expertise and skill to pull off, as well as considerable amounts of money.
You can probably get unsuspecting couriers to deliver last mile. Build a drone dock with cutter to open top of boxes. Mail a weaponized drone to an address within range of target.
Why rely on the original publisher? Let me download it and then share it.
I think it's a much simpler requirement that the product be functional without "phoning home" and when the original prosper stops selling it then libraries abd torrents and archive websites step in.
”real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”
- Linus Torvalds
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