It's way too early to tell. Safe to say that it's different. But it might be better than some of our current async comms.
If I spend time and thought and research around an idea and a corpus of information and dump that all into an LLM and converse with it, eventually producing an artifact that's partly the LLM's processing of that corpus and partly the result of my direction, and you take that artifact and drop it into an LLM and interrogate it with your own perspective and lenses, that's going to go in directions that I may not have imagined for you but will still contain the kernel of my perspective. And you could indeed interrogate the thing, not just sit back and think about it.
No idea whether this is faster/better or shallower/deeper or if it encourages us to connect more or differently as people or what-have-you. At present I'm not even sure I care, personally, about measuring differences on these traditional axes. It just seems like a vast new communication medium worthy of some exploration so that we can collectively have some idea what we're talking about when we do start to judge it.
Yes, "asked" versus "ordered" is meaningfully misleading, especially in this context.
There is reasonable suspicion, some might argue evidence, that Microsoft voluntarily cooperated with U.S. Intelligence Community without being compelled by a court order, the most famous instances being leaked in the Snowden disclosures.
To be fair to Microsoft, here's their updated statement (emphasis mine):
"Microsoft confirmed to Forbes that it does provide BitLocker recovery keys if it receives a valid legal order. “While key recovery offers convenience, it also carries a risk of unwanted access, so Microsoft believes customers are in the best position to decide... how to manage their keys,” said Microsoft spokesperson Charles Chamberlayne."
You’ve overly simplified the degree to which a company must accept a court order without pushback.
First they are capable of fulfilling the request in the first place which means their approach or encryption is inherently flawed. Second companies can very much push back on such requests with many examples of such working, but they need to make the attempt.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect businesses to spend money fighting court orders for customer data, especially if the orders are more or less reasonable.
They do seem to be reasonable in the case that brought about this reporting, with substantial evidence that the suspects committed fraud and that evidence is on the devices in question.
Never means the specifics are irrelevant, you’re making the sad argument on the worst possible case and the best one.
So why should customers entrust their data to the company? It’s a transactional relationship and the less you do the less reason someone has to pay you.
Further, our legal system is adversarial it assumes someone is going to defend you. Without that there’s effectively zero protection for individuals.
People shouldn't entrust highly sensitive data to third parties who aren't highly motivated to protect it. That means different things in different situations, but if you're likely to be investigated by the FBI, don't give Microsoft the encryption keys to your laptop.
As many, many people have pointed out -- many people don't know that their drives are encrypted or know that these protections exist. You're also assuming that the FBI doesn't investigate just random people. "I'm not doing anything bad, why should I worry?"
You're making a lot of assumptions about how people use their computers, their understanding of their own devices, and the banality of building argumentation around what someone should have done or should not have done in the face of how reality works.
I am not assuming the FBI doesn't investigate random people. I am, however assuming that the FBI does not randomly seize computers and obtain court orders demanding encryption keys for them from Microsoft. Unless Microsoft is lying, that happens about 20 times a year.
One of the privacy protections is simply that it's a lot of work to go through that process. The FBI wouldn't have the resources to do it to everyone it's merely curious about even if it had the authority, which it doesn't because warrants require probable cause.
I believe that it's generally acceptable that when law enforcement has probable cause for a search warrant, third parties grant them what access they reasonably can. I also believe people who actually want to protect their privacy and security should learn fundamentals like whoever has the key can unlock it and if nobody has the key, it's gone forever. If I was building a consumer product, I'd have to care quite a bit about the fact that many people won't do that, but I'm not so I don't.
Heh, I subpoena'd Microsoft once in part of some FOIA litigation I did against the White House OMB back in 2017. They, in no unclear terms, denied it. We were seeking documentation.
I realize it's not a court order, but just want to add to the stack that there are examples of them being requested to provide something within the public's interest in a legal context (a FOIA lawsuit) where their counsel pushed back by saying no.
How did you sub poena Microsoft without a court order? Are you saying the court denied your application for an order to produce after Microsoft objected?
I might actually the details wrong. We requested informally at first whether Microsoft could provide information and they declined. Doesn't look like we ended up going down the subpoena route in the end so it didn't really matter.
I would guess that the FBI never asks Microsoft for encryption keys without a valid legal order because it knows Microsoft will demand one, and because the FBI rarely has possession of suspect devices without a warrant to search for them and obtain their contents.
It could be a bigger obstacle for other agencies. CBP can hold a device carried by someone crossing the border without judicial oversight. ICE is in the midst of a hiring surge and from what I've read lately, has an abbreviated screening and training process likely not matching the rigor of the FBI. Local law enforcement agencies vary greatly.
It’s immensely misleading. At least with a valid legal order we are still living by rule of law. With the recent actions I can’t say ICE is acting by rule of law.
Broader context isWindows defaults to making their access to your data legally accessible. Their entire windows platform and one drive defaults to this insecurity
Inlight of fascism coming to Democratic cities and anyone documenting it being a registered domestic terrorist...well thats pretty f'n insecure by default.
At least in Denmark where I live, since Tesla started competing on cost a few years ago, and then the DOGE fiasco. It’s the car you get if you’re already a Tesla owner and hardcore believer, or just see a car as a means of transportation and buy purely on specs. The days when Teslas were status symbols are long gone. We can buy so many other interesting EVs here, for example I just had a friend who was an EV hater six months ago come by showing off his brand new Renault R5 today. That car has 10x more character than a TM3 and costs less even if he got it fully loaded. VAG has a very strong lineup of TMY competitors that combined are vastly outselling it, and so has Kia/Hyundai and Renault. Those with more money will go for BMW, Mercedes, Audi, or even Porsche. And then there are all the Chinese brands starting to make inroads. Most here see buying Chinese as less problematic than buying Musk.
I visited a friend in EU and we had a lot of problems charging a Renault. It takes forever and it was a pain. One of the network chargers didn't work. Problems of the car detecting the charge. And once we found a working charger we had to leave it for a long time and we lost an appointment.
Tesla has a decent supercharger network. And now Chinese manufacturers are building theirs. AFAIK none of the European brands has anything even remotely like that. I heard people buy hybrids due to this problem.
In Northern Europe we have lots of fast chargers now, and apart from Tesla, which is open to anyone with their app, none are tied to a particular car brand. I’ve never encountered problems fast-charging my BMWs. Most cars you can buy today have the option to pre-heat the battery, but it is possible that not all owners know how to activate that. The newer Renaults run on Google software, which is said to be very user friendly and good at route planning.
Apparently the secondhand market is so bad (perhaps due to the whole thing where Tesla doesn’t permit wholly independent resale) that in some markets they’re some of the cheapest to be had that are qualified for ride share drivers. There’s a silly percentage of older teslas being used for that purpose in some cities.
I'm curious if you think the same thing was lost with the transition from reading man pages and first-party documentation to going to stackoverflow or google first (at least, I assume the former was more common a couple decades ago)
What was lost in that transition was the required quality of that first-party documentation decreased; generally that first party documentation simply didn't contain enough information, so you needed to determine things empirically or read source code to get more information. I do think the culture of "copy-and-paste from stackoverflow" harmed the general competency of programmers, but having more third-party information available was only a positive thing.
it seems like a lot of your problem here is being caught off guard that pre-sliced bread, which has been modified so that it does not go stale as it otherwise would, is a processed food. try buying bread from a bakery that goes stale. after recalibrating that expectation maybe this will make more sense overall?
Right. It's like the argument that the 2 party system is an intentional brake on democracy, so we have to legislate reforms into being... with the permission of the 2 party system that determines whether legislation gets passed? The clear logical extension of the argument is that reform on the terms in which we have these problems is ultimately not very workable.
Coding is pretty straightforwardly a craft - something that is done for use value but allows for artistic expression and a convergence of form and function. It isn't art.
However, I disagree that aiming to get enjoyment out of a coding job is necessarily a mistake. But it does often have to be weighed against competing factors like ease of getting a job and pay.
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