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On one hand it's annoying that this is how our government behaves. On the other, in this case at least, they're welcome to the records of my spam emails. I trul
by M_Grey 10y ago
On one hand it's annoying that this is how our government behaves. On the other, in this case at least, they're welcome to the records of my spam emails. I truly wonder if anyone is using Yahoo as anything other than a spam-catcher at this point, or for years now.
To be clear though, the underlying government behavior is reprehensible, and needs to be curtailed. Governments and LEO's are inherently lazy, and if you let them investigate broadly instead of forcing them to specify, they will.
- tptacek 10y agoGovernments are lazy because citizens don't want to pay for them not to be. I don't think this changes your argument much, but this is a rare case where other-izing government actions doesn't reveal much; even the lazy approach being taken here has broad public support.
- M_Grey 10y agoI think people are more apathetic and disenfranchised than lazy, and by design rather than nature.
- waqf 10y agoHow would you pay for a government not to be lazy? You can't trivially turn money into good oversight, because of the agency problem: quis custodiet?
- schoen 10y agoIn the original from Juvenal, it's "quis custodiet" (future tense, 'who will guard?'). The present tense would be "quis custodit" ('who guards?'). I don't think "custodet" is a possible form of that verb; the present subjunctive would be "quis custodiat" ('who would guard?').
- barsonme 10y agoPay as in money? I'd disagree. Governments are lazy because citizens don't hold them accountable for not doing their jobs properly. Why? Same reason we collectively complain about politician or gov't office X doing their jobs poorly yet they've been in office/haven't changed for 20 years--we're too apathetic.
- lvs 10y agoWhy would you think Yahoo was the only recipient of the order?
- M_Grey 10y agoI don't, what made you assume that?
- lvs 10y agoYou implied that other major mail providers might not be subject to this search order. We have no reason to believe they weren't.
- M_Grey 10y agoMaybe you can quote what I said that you feel implied that, because it's nothing I intended to write.
- dandelion_lover 10y agoYou said "they're welcome to the records of my spam emails", which implies that your own email account has no connection to the problem under discussion. Then you generalized that if you are not in danger then no one is.
- M_Grey 10y agoI see where I was talking about myself... I don't see the generalization to the other people though... that would appear to be in your head alone.
- dandelion_lover 10y ago>I truly wonder if anyone is using Yahoo as anything other than a spam-catcher at this point, or for years now. This is the generalization to the other people. "If I do not use Yahoo, then no one does".
- mtgx 10y agoThe Director of the CIA was still using an AOL account, which is worse than Yahoo, until recently. Let that sink in. A lot of normal people may still be using Yahoo account for real communications.
- jhayward 10y ago> an AOL account, which is worse than Yahoo Worse in what material way? You might be surprised to know that AOL was doing things like encrypting even intra-datacenter links as early as 2006. While they would probably not have resisted such an order they would have at least implemented it competently.
- Zigurd 10y agoRecently I was interested in a position with a large and reputed to be IT-savvy company. Their online application gave applicants the choice of "fill out tiresome form with data they already have" or "log in with Yahoo." I thought there MUST be some other choice I missed. I reread the page. searched the page. Refreshed the page. Nope. Just Yahoo. WTF? The 90's called, etc... And, when I did a search for similar application forms, I found out it was hardly an outlier. I started to get interested: More searching uncovered a significant percentage, maybe 10-15% overall, of major technology employers use a job application system that only accept Yahoo identities. It must be some quirk of job application portal vendors. But there it is. Anyone applying to more than one position will find several of these. And since you can't re-use the manually entered identity information across companies, the incentives to use a Yahoo identity are pretty strong. Time-to-payback is the second one you encounter.