4 ms·

On the enforceability of laws

42 points by drewcrawford 16y ago

notmyname 16y ago
I like the quote "technology seems to be giving us back our rights even as the law fails to protect them."
donaldc 16y ago
Of course, this will cause every civilized government to fail, because governments depend on tax dollars. If governments find it impossible to tax income as they lose their monopoly on cash, they will still be able to tax tangible property: land, buildings, cars, airplanes, etc.
westicle 16y ago
i may be misinterpreting the article, so correct me if i'm wrong. is the author suggesting that there is nothing to fear from the possibility of a "pain gun" being used against civilians because sooner or later the steady march of technology will ensure that we all have pain guns to use on eachother? that doesn't sound too comforting to me.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Yes, the flaws in logic and generalizations are legion. Until about the 1970s, if you wanted to send a secret message you needed to employ a small army of mathematicians No you didn't. You used a one-time pad. Computers were not first used for battle, they were first constructed for pure math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine And I eagerly await the day my M-1 Abrams battle tank arrives in the mail. I won't list all the problems in this article. If you want to read it, it might be entertaining to try to find as many as you can. Sort of a rhetorical Where's Walo
  - drewcrawford 16y ago
    > You used a one-time pad. A OTP assumes you have an off-channel secure messaging system. It's like the cryptographical equivalent of begging the question: it's easy to send a secret message! Just already have sent a secret message first! > Computers were not first used for battle, they were first constructed for pure math The difference engine wasn't actually constructed until the 90s. You might have an argument for the Z1.
    - bitwize 16y ago
      All you need is a source of truly random numbers. Make a pad from those numbers, make an exact duplicate of it, give one to your field agent before he goes off on his super-secret mission and keep one at home base. Now you two can communicate over a guaranteed secure channel (provided you don't reuse the pad).
      - drewcrawford 16y ago
        > give one to your field agent before he goes off on his super-secret mission This is cryptography's version of "begging the question". A OTP means that "Given that you already have a secure communications channel (to exchange the one-time-pad), you can send secure messages over other channels." Of course if you already have a secure communication channel, why wouldn't you just use that? Perhaps you think that your "real world example" offers an explanation--remote communications can be more advantageous than local ones. However, as soon as we enter "the real world", we see that the OTP you wrote down can easily be captured along with your physical self, and the message compromised or even modified. This happens often enough in practice: see the "Exploits" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad Modern cryptography (specifically I'm thinking of public-key-based exchange of a private key) doesn't depend on having a secure channel to communicate with in the first place. In addition, private keys can't be captured on your person like a OTP can. So it is both theoretically and actually better than a OTP by multiple orders of magnitude. For these reasons, I think comparing a OTP to modern public or private key cryptography is pretty silly.
        16y ago
kragen 16y ago
People have been writing stuff like this as long as I've been on the 'net; see Tim May's thing about how the Spectre of Crypto-Anarchy is haunting the world, or the manifesto about how the weary giants of flesh and steel have no place in cyberspace. 18 years in, it doesn't seem any closer.
lhnz 16y ago
As others have said, this is a little flawed. The invention of a pain gun is really disturbing no matter what way you look at it. However, I loved the quote at the end: "Technology bestows rights in a way which is true and real far beyond the law. The law can be changed, but you cannot undiscover AES. The law gives you rights as a fiction, but technology gives you rights as a fact."
madair 16y ago
This is a very weak contribution to the question of whether science can truly consider itself amoral, as in, does the march of progress outweigh all other concerns, which many people believe is the case. In this case the author wants us to see pain guns as we see computers, as progress that helps us more than it hurts us. A better analogy may be nuclear weapons, let's see him try to argue the positive effects of bomb which can and has been used to vaporize cities.
- bitwize 16y ago
  The mother of all Rooseveltian big sticks.

42 points by drewcrawford 16y ago

I like the quote "technology seems to be giving us back our rights even as the law fails to protect them."

Of course, this will cause every civilized government to fail, because governments depend on tax dollars. If governments find it impossible to tax income as they lose their monopoly on cash, they will still be able to tax tangible property: land, buildings, cars, airplanes, etc.

westicle 16y ago

i may be misinterpreting the article, so correct me if i'm wrong. is the author suggesting that there is nothing to fear from the possibility of a "pain gun" being used against civilians because sooner or later the steady march of technology will ensure that we all have pain guns to use on eachother? that doesn't sound too comforting to me.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Yes, the flaws in logic and generalizations are legion. Until about the 1970s, if you wanted to send a secret message you needed to employ a small army of mathematicians No you didn't. You used a one-time pad. Computers were not first used for battle, they were first constructed for pure math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine And I eagerly await the day my M-1 Abrams battle tank arrives in the mail. I won't list all the problems in this article. If you want to read it, it might be entertaining to try to find as many as you can. Sort of a rhetorical Where's Walo
- drewcrawford 16y ago
  > You used a one-time pad. A OTP assumes you have an off-channel secure messaging system. It's like the cryptographical equivalent of begging the question: it's easy to send a secret message! Just already have sent a secret message first! > Computers were not first used for battle, they were first constructed for pure math The difference engine wasn't actually constructed until the 90s. You might have an argument for the Z1.
  - bitwize 16y ago
    All you need is a source of truly random numbers. Make a pad from those numbers, make an exact duplicate of it, give one to your field agent before he goes off on his super-secret mission and keep one at home base. Now you two can communicate over a guaranteed secure channel (provided you don't reuse the pad).
    - drewcrawford 16y ago
      > give one to your field agent before he goes off on his super-secret mission This is cryptography's version of "begging the question". A OTP means that "Given that you already have a secure communications channel (to exchange the one-time-pad), you can send secure messages over other channels." Of course if you already have a secure communication channel, why wouldn't you just use that? Perhaps you think that your "real world example" offers an explanation--remote communications can be more advantageous than local ones. However, as soon as we enter "the real world", we see that the OTP you wrote down can easily be captured along with your physical self, and the message compromised or even modified. This happens often enough in practice: see the "Exploits" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad Modern cryptography (specifically I'm thinking of public-key-based exchange of a private key) doesn't depend on having a secure channel to communicate with in the first place. In addition, private keys can't be captured on your person like a OTP can. So it is both theoretically and actually better than a OTP by multiple orders of magnitude. For these reasons, I think comparing a OTP to modern public or private key cryptography is pretty silly.
      - 16y ago

kragen 16y ago

People have been writing stuff like this as long as I've been on the 'net; see Tim May's thing about how the Spectre of Crypto-Anarchy is haunting the world, or the manifesto about how the weary giants of flesh and steel have no place in cyberspace. 18 years in, it doesn't seem any closer.

lhnz 16y ago

As others have said, this is a little flawed. The invention of a pain gun is really disturbing no matter what way you look at it. However, I loved the quote at the end: "Technology bestows rights in a way which is true and real far beyond the law. The law can be changed, but you cannot undiscover AES. The law gives you rights as a fiction, but technology gives you rights as a fact."

madair 16y ago

This is a very weak contribution to the question of whether science can truly consider itself amoral, as in, does the march of progress outweigh all other concerns, which many people believe is the case. In this case the author wants us to see pain guns as we see computers, as progress that helps us more than it hurts us. A better analogy may be nuclear weapons, let's see him try to argue the positive effects of bomb which can and has been used to vaporize cities.

bitwize 16y ago
The mother of all Rooseveltian big sticks.