> If enough people stop believing in the law, it really threatens those in power.
I think this is why the thing judges hate the most is people admitting when the law gives them an unfair advantage.
A rule that unjustly benefits someone is fine as long as they don't break kayfabe. Big Brother loves you, that's why you can't install apps on your phone, it's to protect you from harm. The incidental monopolization, censorship and surveillance are all totally unintentional and not really even happening. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Whereas, declare that you're shamelessly exploiting a loophole? Orange jumpsuit.
I agree, but that's the uncharitable interpretation. The charitable one is that intent matters. Those in power being threatened tends to strongly correlate with societal instability and a distinct lack of public safety. I may not always agree with the status quo but I don't want to live in Somalia either.
There is an action you can take that does two things. One, it makes it marginally more expensive to commit fraud. Two, it makes it significantly more expensive for your existing customers to patronize a competitor. If you do it, which of these things was it your intent to do?
The answer doesn't change based on whether you announce it. You can fully intend to thwart competition without admitting it. And, of course, if the only way you get punished is if you admit it, what you really have is not a law against intending to do it but a law against saying it out loud. Which is poison, because then people knowingly do it without admitting it and you develop a culture where cheating is widespread and rewarded as long as the cheaters combine it with lying.
Whereas if the law is concerned with knowledge but not "intent" then you'd have a law against thwarting competition and it only matters what anyone would expect to be the result rather than your self-proclaimed unverifiable purpose.
But then it's harder to let powerful people get away with things by pretending they didn't intend the thing that everybody knew would be the result. Which is kind of the point.
The Wartime Prohibition Act was passed during the drawdown from World War I and the basis for upholding it was the wartime powers of Congress because of a scarcity of grain from the war.
The last Congressionally declared war was World War II, so if that was supposed to be the constitutional basis for the Controlled Substances Act, there would seem to be the obvious problems that the war was generations ago and nobody is diverting scanty wheat from the food markets to make MDMA.
> its development model cannot consistently provide this product feature.
The real problem is that the hardware vendors aren't using its development model. To make this work you either need a) the hardware vendor to write good drivers/firmware, or b) the hardware vendor to publish the source code or sufficient documentation so that someone else can reasonably fix their bugs.
The Linux model is the second one. Which isn't what's happening when a hardware vendor doesn't do either of them. But some of them are better than others, and it's the sort of thing you can look up before you buy something, so this is a situation where you can vote with your wallet.
A lot of this is also the direct fault of Microsoft for pressuring hardware vendors to support "Modern Standby" instead of rather than in addition to S3 suspend, presumably because they're organizationally incapable of making Windows Update work efficiently so they need Modern Standby to paper over it by having it run when the laptop is "asleep" and then they can't have people noticing that S3 is more efficient. But Microsoft's current mission to get everyone to switch to Linux appears to be in full swing now, so we'll see if their efforts on that front manage to improve the situation over time.
The US has a problem where government revenue has been increasing by the usual amount (i.e. as a percent of GDP it's within the same range it has been for 70+ years), and is therefore the highest it's ever been before in real dollars, but spending has increased by even more than that, and in particular spending has been increasing faster than GDP. But for the last few decades we've had people saying "deficits don't matter".
The trouble is, they kind of do, and now "interest on the debt" is eating a chunk out of the budget that rivals the entire Department of Defense. So not only is spending growing faster than GDP, a huge chunk of the money that had historically gone to cover even the traditional spending is now going to interest. And if the deficit stays how it is, that's only going to get worse.
The result is that there is no "tariff revenues" to spend on anything. Even with the additional revenue, spending still needs to go down just to tread water.
And then the question is, is the thing you're proposing worth more than the additional cuts it would take to cover it, i.e. what do you want to not have in order to have that?
> The trouble is, they kind of do, and now "interest on the debt" is eating a chunk out of the budget that rivals the entire Department of Defense.
Deficits do only sortof matter, but you people (I don't live in the US) are wildly undertaxed by big economy standards, and tax increases at the higher end could solve a lot of your fiscal problems.
The US uses private health insurance instead of a national health service, which explains more than all of the difference in taxation compared to the median country in Europe. If you added what people in the US are paying for health insurance to what they're paying in state and federal taxes, they're paying more than people in Europe do. But if you adopted a public insurance system in the US then the taxes would have to go to that rather than providing revenue to cover existing spending.
The US also has an incredibly cost-inefficient healthcare system, and despite constant attempts to pin it entirely on the insurance companies, the cost problems are primarily related to regulatory capture by healthcare providers and the AMA, which are independent of the funding model. Medicare pays more than countries in Europe do for people in the same age group, because the government can't e.g. limit the number of medical residency slots at the behest of the AMA and then magic away the doctor shortage when they're the ones paying. Which again points to it being a spending problem rather than a revenue problem -- if they'd address the efficiency issues then they wouldn't need such a large government budget.
US per capita government spending is the highest of any economy in the top 30 by GDP. There are only four countries that spend more per capita at all, the largest of which is Norway, which nor only has a public health system included in their number, it also has less than 6 million people and gets a significant proportion of the money from state-owned oil and gas reserves.
If you tried to close the gap with higher taxes then the taxes would come from people in the US, lowering US GDP unless there was a corresponding increase in productive government spending -- which there wouldn't be if you were using it to cover the deficit, because that money otherwise comes from the purchasers of US debt, who are foreign investors, the Fed (when they create new money to buy US treasuries), and large US institutions that buy treasuries to use them as collateral (and thereby result in an economically productive domestic use). Those are the arguments the "deficits don't matter" people make -- in any given year, lower deficits would e.g. reduce inflation a little, but not a lot else. The real problem is that every year's deficit gets recapitalized, and then the interest compounds and turns into a significant long-term problem.
But the "deficits don't matter" people are right in the sense that lowering the deficit wouldn't do much for the economy in the current year. Which means that taking money from economically productive things in order to close it would be bad. Whereas taking money from economically unproductive inefficiencies would be a lot better. Which brings us back to, why is US spending so high when substantially all other countries do it for less?
>> TCP_NODELAY can also make fingerprinting easier in various ways which is a reason to make it something you have to ask for
> Only because it's on by default for no real reason. I'm saying the default should be off.
This is wrong.
I'm assuming here that you mean that Nagle's algorithm is on by default, i.e TCP_NODELAY is off by default. It seems you think the only extra fingerprinting info TCP_NODELAY gives you is the single bit "TCP_NODELAY is on vs off". But it's more than that.
In a world where every application's traffic goes through Nagle's algorithm, lots of applications will just be seen to transmit a packet every 300ms or whatever as their transmissions are buffered up by the kernel to be sent in large packets. In a world where Nagle's algorithm is off by default, those applications could have very different packet sizes and timings.
With something like Telnet or SSH, you might even be able to detect who exactly is typing at the keyboard by analyzing their key press rhythm!
To be clear, this is not an argument in favor of Nagle's algorithm being on by default. I'm relatively neutral on that matter.
> I'm assuming here that you mean that Nagle's algorithm is on by default, i.e TCP_NODELAY is off by default.
Correct, I wrote that backwards, good callout.
RE: fingerprinting, I'd concede the point in a sufficiently lazy implementation. I'd fully expect the application layer to handle this, especially in cases where this matters.
Nagles algorithm does really well when you're on shitty wifi.
Applications also don't know the MTU (the size of packets) on the interface they're using. Hell, they probably don't even know which interface they're using! This is all abstracted away. So, if you're on a network with a 14xx MTU (such as a VPN), assuming an MTU of 1500 means you'll send one full packet and then a tiny little packet after that. For every one packet you think you're sending!
Nagle's algorithm lets you just send data; no problem. Let the kernel batch up packets. If you control the protocol, just use a design that prevents Delayed ACK from causing the latency. IE, the "OK" from Redis.
If nobody is maintaining them, do we really need them? In which case, does it really matter?
If we need them, and they’re not being maintained, then maybe that’s the kind of “scream test” wake up we need for them to either be properly deprecated, or updated.
> If nobody is maintaining them, do we really need them?
Given how often issues can be traced back to open source projects barely scraping along? Yes and they are probably doing something important. Hell, if you create enough pointless busywork you can probably get a few more "helpfull" hackers into projects like xz.
A gzip encoder has no business deciding whether a socket should wait to fill up packets, however. The list of relevant applications and libraries gets a lot shorter with that restriction.
> It's P2P as far as the physical layer (L1) is concerned.
Only in the sense that the L1 "peer" is the switch. As soon as the switch goes to forward the packet, if ports 2 and 3 are both sending to port 1 at 1Gbps and port 1 is a 1Gbps port, 2Gbps won't fit and something's got to give.
Right but the switch has internal buffers and ability to queue those packets or apply backpressure. Resolving at that level is a very different matter from an electrical collision at L1.
Not as far as TCP is concerned it isn't. You sent the network a packet and it had to throw it away because something else sent packets at the same time. It doesn't care whether the reason was an electrical collision or not. A buffer is just a funny looking wire.
> So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
I approve of this, because they were going to come up with an excuse one way or another, but "it's classified" has been a BS excuse that has received far too much deference to cover for all kinds of nonsense going back many decades, and being sufficiently flagrant about it is exactly what it takes to create enough of a backlash to finally do something about it.
> when it costs >$10B to develop a new microchip manufacturing process that inherently limits how many players the market can support.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything. Given that there's the financial incentive to do it, how would you prevent companies from growing vertically? If you declared a legal limit, how would you prevent a single entity from forming a chain of companies, effectively producing one huge vertical company as well?
> I assume it's cheaper to own the whole vertical slice at this scale, so you can control everything.
In general it's the opposite: Internal politics destroys value and a single point of failure is a business risk even if you own it because failure is rarely intentional.
As an example of the first, Kodak invented digital cameras but then failed to capitalize on them because it would have cannibalized their film business, and now their film business is dead anyway but so is the entire company. As an example of the second, Intel has vertically integrated fabs but now that their fabs are behind it's sinking the rest of the company. You could tell a similar story about AMD a decade and a half ago and spinning off their fabs is a big part of what saved them. IBM was also a big vertically integrated monster back in the day and they got out-competed by, well, everybody, and now they're a hollowed out consultancy.
The way out of this for a large conglomerate is to not take internal dependencies. So for example, Samsung makes both DRAM and devices, and they typically use their own DRAM in their own devices. But it's industry standard DRAM that they sell to anyone who is willing to pay them for it, and if Samsung's DRAM fabs all got destroyed by a natural disaster or their technology fell behind for some reason, their device units could immediately switch to a competitor until their DRAM unit got their house back in order. Likewise, if their consumer devices became uncompetitive their DRAM unit could still sell to the rest of the market because they're not fully beholden to a single internal customer. And having that serves as a canary; Intel didn't have external fab customers so it didn't notice them switching to TSMC, which would otherwise have been a red flag.
The "problem" is that you need to have some foresight. Everything's great until it isn't. If a company waits until one of the internal units has a problem before realizing that it's a single point of failure for other business units, it's too late to redesign the ship after you've already hit the iceberg.
It's worse than that. It's people generating a moral panic so they can retroactively declare something to be crimethink and then use that as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with them by trawling through their history. In which case it's not a matter of standing by it because mobs aren't interested in context or nuance.
Society's defense against this should be that we don't use mobs to punish people for saying things we disagree with and anybody who attempts to do that gets laughed off the stage. Because as soon as that's not what happens, the public discourse gets marred by self-censorship until enough time passes with it not happening that people stop expecting it to and thereby stop worrying that they can't know what's going to be declared an offense tomorrow.
But now that it has happened recently, the only way to get it back in the short term is to have people posting under pseudonyms.
The problem is not people criticizing ideas. The problem is people attacking other people for saying things they don't like, trying to get them fired, etc.
Attack their arguments, not their family, employer, etc.
> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no.
Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either.
Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.
Who do you think is doing the CSAM? It's the criminal organizations and the terrorists and the Russian hackers, obviously.
Nobody really cares what the excuse du jour is because everybody knows that's what it is. Authoritarians want to build a censorship apparatus to use against the public, but if they say "we want to spy on our political opponents and censor people who disagree with us" then nobody would support it, so instead they say "we have to get the pedos and Putin" even though that's 0.5% of what a system like this would actually be used for if implemented.
I think this is why the thing judges hate the most is people admitting when the law gives them an unfair advantage.
A rule that unjustly benefits someone is fine as long as they don't break kayfabe. Big Brother loves you, that's why you can't install apps on your phone, it's to protect you from harm. The incidental monopolization, censorship and surveillance are all totally unintentional and not really even happening. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Whereas, declare that you're shamelessly exploiting a loophole? Orange jumpsuit.
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