Just like many people are optimists in thinking criminals will get consequences, criminals are often optimists in thinking they won’t get consequences.

Both have cherry-picked their life experiences to support this view.

Eventually, people will grow tired of it and the pendulum will swing the other way.

It’s why the first move of the administration was to replace senior FBI and military leaders with cronies. To hold the pendulum back.

They absolutely know there will eventually be consequences (by default), which is why they work so hard to throw other people under the bus and make a giant confusing mess of things. To try to avoid them.

Secrecy enables several things, including:

- abuse

- incompetence

- getting away with breaking rules and laws

Sometimes, those are desirable or necessary for national security/pragmatic reasons.

For instance, good luck running an effective covert operation without being abusive to someone or breaking rules and laws somewhere!

Usually (80/20 rule) it’s just used to be shitty and make a mess, or be incompetent while pretending to be hot shit.

In a real war, these things usually get sorted out quickly because the results matter (existentially).

Less so when no one can figure out who the actual enemy is, or what we’re even fighting (if anything).

It does mean we should recognize that SSL is nice for some basic privacy/security, but not perfect security.

Same with remote attestation. Not all implementations are actually secure. But hopefully over time those security bugs can be ironed out and the cost to extract a key be made infeasable.

Hopefully not. What you have just said is a synonym for "But hopefully over time manufacturers will be able to completely prevent users from running unapproved software."

In the case of video game consoles that could be the case. It turned out that being able to run unapproved software results mainly in people playing pirated games. These security measures are reactive to the actions other people have taken. We already experimented with computing being the wild west where there was little to no security. It turned out that bad actors will abuse anything they can find. Even if it's not economical some attackers will still cause abuse.

There's always going to be a market for computers that can run unapproved software. I don't see that going away.

Huh? Why should people who pay for the hardware not be able to run whatever they want? Why include them as ‘attackers’?

Shareholders über alles?

How is it just his testimony if they can literally locate the device to the location?

That’s just ‘oh, my poor back’.

In both cases, the real issue is when the oil (eventually all do) oxidizes and ‘gums’. Tight tolerances make it cause worse problems sooner of course, but it’s the same problem eventually.

Putting new fresh oil in it often temporarily fixes it because it dissolves some (or a lot) of the old varnish. Acetone can often do the same thing too, but can also wash the varnish deeper into the mechanism where it turns into really solid ‘plastic’ when the acetone dissolves.

I wonder how many different chemicals can be described as ‘c9-c11’ chains. Thousands?

Yes but I doubt the manufacturer is consistent with how much of each is in there either

Maybe one of the nearly powerless ones? Australia?

Hmm, nope.

To be fair, if you want a boogie man which won’t even mind being used as one - Russia is a great option.

To be fair, regardless of the details, every case in Russia is a political case. It’s the way the judiciary works there.

Cut the crap please. There is a huge difference between likes of say serial rapist and ones that are in prison because they voiced disagreement with the Russian government. Btw the West happily deporting Russians who are in opposition to regime and are chased by it..

Something something some guy Assange.

Yes, the USA did the same with Assange. The same with Chelsea Manning - she was accused of treason and basically faced capital punishment at some point. I'm grateful to Obama that he basically saved her life.

But in Russia, this is on a completely another level. Especially if you started the business in the 90s, there is no way they couldn't dig up any dirt on you.

Do you understand what you come out as someone who defends the criminals which exploited the post-USSR break-up for their own enrichment through the illegal means which often involved the deaths and murders?

No, it didn't work this way back then. In order to survive, you had to do what everyone else, for example make payments to some people. Today you can set up a business without having to deal with this shit so people have no idea what it was like back then. People who murdered others are a different category altogether.

Nobody is clean (and survives). I don’t think they were defending anyone per-se.

China and the cultural revolution was similar, and Chinese courts are similarly ‘what the party wants’.

We’ll see what US courts end up looking like at the end of this decade.