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Definitions of words matter when people skim text as to determine how they communicate their opinions, form their opinions, and take action, including writing

Definitions of words matter when people skim text as to determine how they communicate their opinions, form their opinions, and take action, including writing legislation. If I was actually typing out the opinions of my spouse word for word: whose age combined with my own is divisible by 3, how would that change your view?

j2kun 12y ago
Of course definitions matter. My point is that your definition is not specific enough to be useful.
- cheatsheet 12y ago
  Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed to have access to that category of information, then that information ceases to be private.
  - Double_Cast 12y ago
    You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good idea and is what the DDG post is advocating. j2kun was bringing up another solution to privacy which was cryptographic rather than legal. Cryptographers generally use "private" in a "is it physically possible for a bad actor to decrypt this" sense. In which case, there's always a possibility that bad actor can access it. It's just a question of "how likely?" (any encryption requiring a deciphering-technique which takes more than polynomial-time to crack is considered good-enough). In order for the data to be of any use, someone (be it the user or a trusted friend) has to be able to decrypt it. But if you (or your friend) can decrypt it, a hacker can also decrypt it. Hopefully, the hacker will find it more difficult without knowing the key. But the one in a million chance that he'll crack it on the first try exists by necessity.Even titanium breaks under stress. In the pathological case that there's zero possibility (not even epsilon), the whole business of encryption is rendered moot because the rightful user himself cannot access the data! This means one of two things: the data is corrupt; or the data has been deleted entirely.
    - cheatsheet 12y ago
      Computer security has more subfields than cryptography. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28information_theory%29#Security_type_system http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28informati...
  - j2kun 12y ago
    Again, you are revealing your ignorance of mathematics and arguing that you don't like the way a word is used in a context you don't understand.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - cheatsheet 12y ago
      Okay, but those ad hominem attacks won't stop some people from training their machines better than implementations of these algorithms can manage the complexities between data kinds and data object noise.

j2kun 12y ago

Of course definitions matter. My point is that your definition is not specific enough to be useful.

cheatsheet 12y ago
Yours is mathematically nonsensical. You either have discrete containers that denote privacy relations between information and parties or you do not have it at all. Privacy does not exist on a gradient on a computer. You can not calculate the percentage of how private something is. If it is marked 'private information' and that information is released to a party not under the user / group / role term that is supposed to have access to that category of information, then that information ceases to be private.
- Double_Cast 12y ago
  You're discussing a different problem. You're using "private" in a legal sense. As in "it's either legal or it's not". Passing privacy laws is certainly a good idea and is what the DDG post is advocating. j2kun was bringing up another solution to privacy which was cryptographic rather than legal. Cryptographers generally use "private" in a "is it physically possible for a bad actor to decrypt this" sense. In which case, there's always a possibility that bad actor can access it. It's just a question of "how likely?" (any encryption requiring a deciphering-technique which takes more than polynomial-time to crack is considered good-enough). In order for the data to be of any use, someone (be it the user or a trusted friend) has to be able to decrypt it. But if you (or your friend) can decrypt it, a hacker can also decrypt it. Hopefully, the hacker will find it more difficult without knowing the key. But the one in a million chance that he'll crack it on the first try exists by necessity.Even titanium breaks under stress. In the pathological case that there's zero possibility (not even epsilon), the whole business of encryption is rendered moot because the rightful user himself cannot access the data! This means one of two things: the data is corrupt; or the data has been deleted entirely.
  - cheatsheet 12y ago
    Computer security has more subfields than cryptography. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28information_theory%29#Security_type_system http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_%28informati...
- j2kun 12y ago
  Again, you are revealing your ignorance of mathematics and arguing that you don't like the way a word is used in a context you don't understand.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - cheatsheet 12y ago
    Okay, but those ad hominem attacks won't stop some people from training their machines better than implementations of these algorithms can manage the complexities between data kinds and data object noise.