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Comment: To whom? (Score 1) 206

by Opportunist (#46489581) Attached to: U.S. Aims To Give Up Control Over Internet Administration

That's maybe the biggest question here. The US hands over control of the internet. Ok. Fine. Sounds good on paper. But who gets control? And please don't say "nobody". Like it or not, certain things need to be policied by some entity. The two things that immediately spring into the mind are domain name control and IP address assignation. Pretty much anything where "globally unique" is a key feature will have to have some kind of controlling entity.

And the very LAST thing I could possibly see as beneficial is if that control was handed to certain entities that would all too eagerly take control of it. Namely corporations with an interest in controlling those resources. Can you imagine what it would be like if a for-profit organization takes over certain aspects of the net? Especially the "globally unique" ones? If you thought domain name turf wars have been problematic, you ain't seen nothing yet.

I'm certainly not someone who thinks it's a perfect solution to hand the control of an important resource to a single country. Far from it. If anything, handing it to the EU sounds sensible, considering how much infighting is going on there and how much bickering, the chance that they could use it against the rest of the world is sufficiently small. Ok, I'm kidding. But I guess it is easy to understand how it's hard to find a good governing body for something like this. Who should take over?

The UN? Please. Take a look at how much success they had with world peace and world hunger and ponder how much more important those two things are compared to the internet. Then consider how much success they'd have policying and governing the internet.

A multi-national consortium? Where's the difference to the UN?

The EU? As I said, considering how much in-fighting and bickering is going on there, it probably carries the lowest risk of anything bad happening. But also the lowest chance of ANYTHING happening when something needs to be done. Plus the highest chance that it will eventually be sold off to the highest bidding corporation.

Decentralize it? Good idea on paper, that was essentially the basic idea behind the internet, but it has deviated from that a long while ago. It's very unlikely that this can still fly. Most likely we'll be running into severe problems before long. Especially when certain countries decide it's a good idea to do a few things differently so they can more easily avoid doubleplusungood ideas to reach the plebs.

Who should take control? I can't really think of many good alternatives, but I'm eager to hear suggestions.

Comment: That's by far not complete (Score 4, Insightful) 415

by Opportunist (#46485183) Attached to: Lies Programmers Tell Themselves

"These specs are now exactly what the client wants, no need to think of eventualities"
"Nobody will ever need that feature"
"I don't need to comment that, it's obvious what it does"
"Once the prototype runs, it's going to be easy"
"I'll do it right, then I'll never ever have to touch it again"
"One last meeting to go to"
"There's no possible way this could become a security risk"
$change + "can't break anything"
"It COULD create a race condition in theory, but it can't happen in reality"

And finally, the ever popular
"I'll just slap something together now so we can ship it, I'll eventually get around to do it right"

Comment: Security software with a known backdoor is useless (Score 3, Insightful) 20

Even if it was for a "good cause". Let's for a moment even assume that the NSA is an all-holy entity that could never do anything wrong and that we trusted them implicitly, not because our software forces us to but because we genuinely wanted to.

Note the subjunctive.

Even then the security software would be a security hazard. Simply and plainly because there is (at least) one way to access data that is absolutely beyond your control. You cannot even audit the security level of the entity holding the additional key to your data.

If you need to give your non-tech boss a way to understand the severity, that's like having a general key to your office and the safe with all the highly classified and mission critical papers deposited at your local police force. While by itself not a problem (provided you trust your police), they are not required to give you any information concerning the key's storage or whereabouts. You will not be notified how they themselves will keep that key safe, nor do you get any kind of information should that key get stolen. You will not be notified if some potential attacker or burglar, or even a competitor, gets access to that key, legally or illegally.

Comment: And these idiots make laws concerning that (Score 2) 299

Think about it, next time you wonder how on earth someone could come up with a law that is so far away from reality that it hurts. These people are the same the make laws concerning computers, the internet and everything connected to it. Most of the time taken verbatim from sources that have a rather intense interest in certain laws (aka "lobbying groups"), without even having the slightest idea what their laws will entail.

And this is why the whole crap is in the sorry state it is in today, with laws that are not executable, laws that make no sense, laws you cannot heed and laws that benefit a minority at the expense of everyone else.

And it's only half as dangerous as long as it's just domestic. It gets downright scary, though, when international laws get negotiated. Because one thing is certain: Whatever country can field the ones that can spell TCP/IP without too many accidents will be the one-eyed king amongst the blind.

Even though I'd fear that he'll just be the one eyed dummy that's being remote controlled by some corporate lawyer who DOES have an idea what he's doing.

Comment: Re:And that's my problem with Snowden... (Score 1) 76

by Opportunist (#46440727) Attached to: The NSA Has an Advice Columnist

Fine. But at the very least I think the public has a right to KNOW it. It's your money at work there, and if you pay for it I think you should at least be interested in its spending.

Whether or not that expense is justified is not something I should decide, I agree. It's something the taxpayers of the United States should decide.
