Over the last few months, we’ve seen a stream of anti-encryption rhetoric from various voices in New York State. Now, a formal bill has been put before the New York State Assembly, which would mandate that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and any other phone vendor create backdoor devices that would allow them to decrypt devices. The actual text of the bill reads:
Any smartphone that is manufactured on or before January 1, 2016, and sold or leased in New York, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider. (Reformatted from original to remove caps lock)
While the bill was introduced last summer (hence the “2016” label), it’s recently been sent to committee for polishing, where the 2016 date would presumably be changed to 2017 or 2018. Either way, the justification for the bill, is pretty much what you’d expect. Because some criminals may use smartphones some of the time, Google and Apple are “announcing to criminals, ‘use this device.'” The summary notes continue: “The safety of the citizenry calls for a legislative solution, and a solution is easily at hand. Enacting this bill would penalize those who would sell smart-phones that are beyond the reach of law enforcement.” This is the second time the bill has been sent to committee, and there’s currently no vote scheduled — but political bills like this are a stark reminder of how determined certain areas of government are to prevent citizens from using encryption tools and securing their own hardware. In and of itself, the main effect of New York’s bill would be to send NYS citizens scurrying to find Apple stores in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
-- submitted from IRC
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Following a recent attempt in New York to legislate backdoors or ban encrypted devices, a California lawmaker is trying to do the same. Only this time, the boogeyman is human trafficking:
A second state lawmaker has now introduced a bill that would prohibit the sale of smartphones with unbreakable encryption. Except this time, despite very similar language to a pending New York bill, the stated rationale is to fight human trafficking, rather than terrorism.
Specifically, California Assemblymember Jim Cooper's (D-Elk Grove) new bill, which was introduced Wednesday, would "require a smartphone that is manufactured on or after January 1, 2017, and sold in California, to be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider."
If the bill passes both the Assembly and State Senate and is signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown (D), it would affect modern iOS and Android devices, which enable full-disk encryption that neither Apple nor Google can access. AB 1681's language is nearly identical to another bill re-introduced in New York state earlier this month, but Cooper denied that it was based on any model legislation, saying simply that it was researched by his staff. He also noted that the sale of his own iPhone would be made illegal in California under this bill.
Cooper himself, a 30 year veteran with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, told Ars that allowing local law enforcement to access unencrypted phones through the warrant process was not the same thing as allowing the National Security Agency or the CIA free rein. He also noted that "99 percent" of Californians would never have their phones be implicated in a law enforcement operation, implying that they should not have to worry.
Engadget puts it best: "The bill would put every Californian's digital security at risk to prosecute a few pimps."
In other Crypto War news, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers recently said that "encryption is foundational to the future," staking an opposite position from that of FBI Director James Comey.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:34PM
Even ignoring potential Constitutional issues, when Apple, Samsung, etc. all stop having their products sold in NY, the merchants will start a shitstorm.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @06:57PM
How long before NY phones get hacked?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:04PM
Obvious loop-hole: instead of shipping obsolete phones to third-world countries, we can ship them to New York!
Many will even support strong encryption since they were manufactured before 2016. (Unless the bill specifically prohibits refurbishing old phones for the use of strong encryption)
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:07PM
I hope it goes through. Then i can see which phone brands/models not to buy : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:14PM
Possible scenario: The phone makers will just sell NY-approved models with software backdoors. Anybody will just root the phone if they want to get rid of the backdoor.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by githaron on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:22PM
Or those living in New York will buy there phone online or in the next nearest state.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:43PM
The people with either the knowledge or motivation to do that will find their way onto a watchlist or two eventually.
If LEOs/FBI/NSA really want to bypass your phone's encryption, they'll do it using a zero-day vulnerability.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by captain normal on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:20PM
That was also my thought. Just go to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, or Massachusetts and buy and set up your phone there. These days it doesn't matter what area code your phone is attached to as virtually all carriers have pretty much nation wide and world wide plans. If you are worried that NY officials will track you by your credit card purchases, then do like all the crooks do, buy a cheap burner phone. You can walk into any Walmart or Target and get an Android phone for around US$ 50.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:50PM
stop having their products sold in NY
HAHAHA.... oh wow... Dude, there's money to be made. Do you really think these companies will take the consumer's side?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:04PM
There is no consumer's side of anything WRT government and corporations.
Corporations generally own the government, but you could call this aggressive negotiations between two factions: corporations and intelligence communities. Neither are too generally concerned with the well being or civil rights of the people, just their own continued existence and agendas.
Yes, the manufacturers will stop selling the phones. Did you forget how some of the cable channels held the cable providers over the coals? Like when (I don't watch TV, so these are random examples) NBC could no longer be distributed on DISH? Then they both took out full page advertisements to tell their customers the other one was at fault?
This a gold-mine for corporations and a severe tactical mistake on the part of NYC government. People can, and will, purchase their phones outside of the State of New York, and the equipment providers need only wait for the "siege of New York" to lift naturally as politicians scramble to woo back their electorate with appeals to fear, patriotism, whatever. Meanwhile, the providers can laugh to the bank by creating pre-paid programs designed for nothing more than to service New York from neighboring states.
New York is not the entire market on the East Coast, much less the entire USA. Way too much room for maneuvers on part of the corporations. Now, if this was a Federal decree against encryption nationwide, then the consumers would really be fucked.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, villains are laughing hysterically while playing with their handlebar mustaches. As if mandating some backdoors was going to help! Those criminals smart enough to obtain private communications.... will still be able to obtain private communications. Only ones affected are the honest and innocent people.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pendorbound on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:16PM
I honestly do think at least some manufacturers would side with consumers against the law. Considering that Apple's CEO is of a sexual orientation that is still to this day the subject of ridicule and discrimination in instances where privacy and discretion have broken down, I think the company is likely to continue its uncompromising stance that personal privacy is more important than enabling law enforcement fishing expeditions.
Given how <sarcasm>unequivocally successful</sarcasm> NY's efforts to enforce unpopular gun control laws have been, I can easily see Apple playing chicken and winning. The press of being, "the only state in the union where you can't buy an iPhone," would be humiliating if it was spun the right way.
Considering Millennials (who out number Gen-X & Y) have been waking up to the idea that privacy is important, I doubt a few NY lawmakers could stand their ground with such a large voting bloc against this. It's one thing to get people to agree that the abstract of "privacy" is important, but if you have something as concrete to report as, "You can't buy an iPhone because your state lawmakers want to take your privacy away from you...."
Bring popcorn. The media circus should be a good show...
And never mind the Interstate Commerce Clause, but anyways....
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:38PM
Oh. My. God. You must be a Millennial yourself to think such haughty thoughts of yourself and to carry such a view. You're talking a generation "who grew up on this stuff" and "are completely at home with this stuff" (and other idiotic phrases that are required to be included in every Millennial + Tech story) and have ZERO compunction of putting every fucking inane and trivial bit of information about themselves online. In fact, they fall over themselves giving up their personal information from platform to platform, endlessly trying to show how cool they are by getting in on the Next Big Thing. Giving over all they can to Facebook, it is now uncool because even Grandma has an account, so lets do the same thing with Twitter! You want to see a Periscope of me taking a shit? You can live the experience with me! Come on! That Periscope follows naturally from that Snapchat I put up of the half-eaten Taco Bell burrito I ate (and had to share)!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:47PM
Bwaa haaa haa! I didn't even get to this little gem! Oh yeah, that Millennial Power Bloc that turns out in droves, up to 4% [nyccfb.info]!!!
You realize that a big number times a very little number gives you a small number, right?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday January 20 2016, @09:53PM
Only if that very little number happens to be less than 1 and more than 0, then yes, it gives you a smaller number than the big number. Otherwise, you end up with a number bigger than the big number.
Although this is fairly complicated math. Can I get a polymath to help here? :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:39PM
That's not stopping Tesla Motors.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday January 19 2016, @09:58PM
“The safety of the citizenry calls for a legislative solution, and a solution is easily at hand.
I'm pretty sure that's a mistake right there. A solution is not easily at hand, as you and many other commenters have pointed out.
This won't happen.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Tuesday January 19 2016, @11:08PM
Any smartphone that is manufactured on or before January 1, 2016, and sold or leased in New York, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider.
Why don't they instead pass the following legislation, which would be much more useful and do a lot more good:
Any vehicle that is manufactured on or before January 1, 2016, and sold or leased in New York, shall not injure or cause harm to any pedestrian, driver, or passenger.
Or maybe they could legislate away alcoholism, or workplace injuries, or a whole host of other ills. All you need is a simple law and all the problems will go away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @02:31AM
Should we tell them that should be "on or after"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:03PM
"on or before" makes this law unconstitutionally retroactive and only valid for phones made in the past. Any phone made after that date would not need to comply. So this bill, as written has nothing to do with anti-encryption but anti-old-devices.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:45PM
oops, I read that completely back-ward. So any phone made after that date does not require a back-door?
Must be an implementation bug.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:26PM
Are these the same guys who tried to ban big-cup sodas? They are going too far to the left. True progressives would merely tax big-cup sodas to dissuade purchase rather than outright ban. Most kids don't have a lot of cash and wouldn't buy the heavily marked-up bigger fountain drinks.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:07PM
I have no idea where you get that idea. "True" progressives love applying their plans by force of law.
Sometimes they ally with liberals, for more liberal policies, but progressives are dead happy passing openly illiberal laws to force people to act the way they want to. A notorious example in recent memory is the affordable care act - which in true orwellian style did very little to make care more affordable, but under that heading demanded a lot of things from a lot of people, and stopped a whole list of activities the progressive legislators didn't like, such as catastrophic insurance plans.
It doesn't even matter whether you think the affordable care act was a good idea or a bad idea, or even a sad step necessary to move to a better future, or a stalking horse for incipient socialism - it was measurably a dictatorial act based on open progressive but quite illiberal goals and logic.
You can also look throughout history. FDR was notably progressive, and loved laws declaring how people shall or shall not act, do business, grow crops, employ others, set prices and so on.
So no. History tells us that true progressives will ban big soda cups, dictate commercial limits such as encryption in phones, require all sorts of behaviours, plans, programs and policies in universities that require more administrators who cost more to hire in more buildings that have to be built ...
... and it's all for your own good, so shut up and stop whining.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:39PM
Except that true Scotsmen^wprogressives wanted a single-payer system, not the insurance handout we got. But yes, progressives like all activists like to tell people what they can and cannot do. In this case it's things like you cannot work your workers more than 40 hours or pay them less than a living wage, cannot pollute the air and water, etc. Unfortunately, just leading by example doesn't seem to have been effective in making progress so there's a strong tendency for progessives to want to codify these behaviors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @01:43AM
Sure, they wanted single payer.
However, this was all that they could pass in the real world. As it was, the payoffs, gladhanding and general sausagemaking to get the right number of votes was legendary. The fact that the real hardcore progressives might have wanted single payer didn't mean much in the face of what was politically possible.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:48PM
The problem with your analysis is that the Affordable Care Act was a product of a right-wing thinktank called the Heritage Institute, and first implemented by a Republican governor named Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. It's really not a very good example.
A better way of thinking about things is the 4-axis theory of politics: social freedom vs. economic freedom. Someone who wants extreme social and economic freedoms is a libertarian, someone who wants extreme social freedom but no economic freedoms (they want government control of industry) is a "liberal" (in American parlance) or left-winger, someone who wants extreme economic freedom but no social freedom (i.e., they want homosexuality banned but want businesses to be able to pollute as much as they want) is a "conservative" or right-winger, and someone who wants no social or economic freedoms is an authoritarian. Of course, these are all extreme positions, most people are in the middle of the 2D graph somewhere.
You're conflating social and economic freedoms. Laws about employing people, setting prices, regulating the insurance industry, etc., are examples of things where economic freedom has been curtailed. Any regulation of industry, in fact, is a curtailment of economic freedom. We tried doing that back in the Gilded Age and it didn't work out very well. Laws about how people shall or shall not act (like what clothes they're allowed to wear, what kind of relationships they're allowed to have with other people, and arguably what kind of food they're allowed to buy voluntarily) are examples of curtailments of social freedom. Usually it's the religious conservatives who want to make laws curtailing social freedom: just look at how much they hate gay people and don't want them to get married. However, some of the things we see in NYC don't seem "Progressive" at all, they seem downright Authoritarian. IMO, a true progressive would want to use government-funded education campaigns to encourage people to eat better and not drink Big Gulp sodas, rather than trying to ban them. Or they might want to add an extra tax for them (or both). After all, this approach has actually worked pretty well at dealing with smoking; smokers have become pariahs in the US, aren't allowed to smoke inside any more and have to go sit in the cold, and packs of cigarettes are obscenely expensive. Sucks for the smokers, but the rest of us can breathe a whole lot better. Compare our smoking rates to South Korea or even much of Europe; we have much cleaner air over here and much fewer problems with lung cancer and emphysema. They didn't ban smoking like the Temperance people tried with alcohol 100 years ago, but they did succeed in making it socially unpopular.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @01:40AM
Oh goodness, not that nonsense again.
Let's lay this out with some care:
The heritage institute guys made a bunch of proposals, including universal (or near-universal) purchase of insurance and some regulations around those policies. So far, so good ... but there is a bunch of stuff in the PPACA that the heritage institute never mentioned, and some of their ideas didn't make it into the PPACA, or Massachusetts law either. So beyond the generic idea that somehow anything remotely connected to the Heritage Foundation couldn't possibly be progressive, it's just not persuasive.
As for the Massachusetts implementation, he may have had an R behind his name, but Romney was the (generously) centrist governor of a cobalt blue state. He didn't get to write the laws he signed - the state's legislature did that. He could either sign or veto, and even if you follow the fantasy that he was a slavering fan of the law every moment, in every line of text? There's still a lot of stuff in the PPACA that was completely different from what was in Massachusetts quite simply because of jurisdictional differences, and monkeying around with things like Medicare in the process.
So no. Superficial similarities aside, the final outcome of either the Massachusetts law, or the federal one, was not nearly as rightwing as the scary Heritage Foundation's namedrop might make it seem.
Now what did the law actually do? It proscribed and prescribed a lot of things with respect to health insurance, how it could, should, must or must not be offered, purchased, defined, limited and supplemented. It further tried to hogtie the states and haul them along - a plan that ran aground on the rocks of the Supreme Court that suddenly remembered that the tenth amendment exists.
So what do progressives do? They want to reform society to be better, in line with the lessons of the enlightenment and its following development up through the nineteenth century. The very term echoes the "benefits of progress" that politicians from Winston Churchill through Teddy Roosevelt were championing. When they were active a hundred years ago, there was clearly a crying need for reform. Workers' rights, civil rights, infrastructure spending, all these were great progressive programmes with clear social benefits from which society drew vast benefit. However, they were not necessarily liberal. Sometimes progressives found alliances with warhawks in building infrastructure and improving education and introducing nutrition programmes. Sometimes they found allies with liberals who wanted to improve the lot of various minorities. But to paint progressives as being in any way consistently liberal, or averse to dictatorialism, just doesn't match the history of the last century. Progressives were rock solid behind Prohibition - until it didn't work. There's your classic dictatorialism at work, and all for the noblest of reasons. Prohibition would increase the health of the nation, stop spousal abuse, reduce crime and hearten moral fibre - until it didn't.
What you're suggesting in terms of trying to educate people into better choices is the liberal approach - let people make choices, but help them to be wise. Progressives simply slap the soda cup away and tell you it's for your own good, then pat themselves on the back for striking yet another blow against Big Sugar, or Big Caffeine, or Big Soda, or whoever they hate this week. Hence the analysis of the PPACA as (after all the logrolling and backscratching in congress) a solidly progressive program, regardless of what (completely different) genesis it might have had in the context of a different discussion in a thinktank somewhere.
And as for the conflation of social and economic liberties, the whole point is that to progressives both of those classifications are not goods in and of themselves, but solely contingent on a different vision of the perfect society. Gay rights? Great stuff. Polygamy? The spawn of the devil. Polyandry? *coughcoughshuffle* er, must have been a source of abuse or something. Complex polyamory? Fantastic. Complex polyamorous marriages? ... I don't know what their orthodoxy says yet, because it doesn't affect the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders fan club's songsheet yet.
It's not that I disagree with you about social and economic liberties, but I'm just pointing out that it's the wrong rubric for analysis of progressivism because they don't use that as a basis for distinction. You need to see what they're driving at, not what someone else is driving at.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 20 2016, @10:58PM
If we apply your view of economic freedom to politics, what you end up with is monarchy. Sure, the Monarch is free to do any damn thing they want, but what about everyone else?
We generally consider the ideal political freedom to be something like a Republic, where "your rights end where my rights begin" and "all men are created equal". So the same ought to be true of economics. True freedom would be a system in which one person cannot use their economic power to harm or exploit others. Does the Bill of Rights curtail freedoms by (theoretically....) restricting the actions of certain government agents?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday January 20 2016, @04:54AM
Are these the same guys who tried to ban big-cup sodas?
No. They're not. That was Bloomberg in NYC.
These are the lovely folks in Albany who gave us the likes of Sheldon Silver [nydailynews.com], Dean Skelos [nydailynews.com], Thomas Libous [nydailynews.com] and many others [nypost.com].
They are going too far to the left.
Careful now, your selective memory is showing. Firstly, the "left" in the U.S. (NY included) would be considered center-right anywhere else. Secondly, the "right" has plenty of authoritarian and liberty destroying tendencies as well.
Case in point: under G.W. Bush we saw the USA PATRIOT Act and a plethora of illegal and unconstitutional surveillance programs which have been continued in the Obama administration.
There's plenty of blame to go around, friend.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:43PM
Fear not, one State can't do this. If NY tried all that would happen is there would be a massive build out of phone stores right on the other side of the New Jersey line. With phone number portability they would even be able to keep their NY numbers. Imagine how many jobs would be lost in NYC and realize how fast the law would be overturned. Assuming at least Apple and Samsung hung tough and said NO.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:53PM
Easy fix: make it illegal for residents of NY state to own a cell phone bought anywhere else/that doesn't provide the backdoor. If you're gonna do crazy, you may as well go *FULL ON* crazy.
Secondly:
Assuming at least Apple and Samsung hung tough and said NO.
Yeah... let me know how that works out for you...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:52PM
How exactly would that work with all the out-of-state and foreign visitors that NYC receives? Or would it only apply to state residents? Either way, that sounds like a real mess.
I'll admit, it'd be interesting to see them actually try it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:54PM
There's a reason politicians can continue to wage a failed war on crypto. It's a stupid, lazy, easily scared and distracted populace.
The attacks on digital liberties will never cease. Loopholes are found in current law, and scum like FBI Director Comey attack encryption publicly while using zero-days to attack systems secretly. Rallying cries of #StopSOPA and #RememberAaronSwartz get stale after a few iterations.
If this law passes and survives legal challenges, will people rush over the border for phones, order them online, or jailbreak phones to get rid of software backdoors? Some will, many won't. Perhaps some "terrorists" will be among those who bypass the law, assuming they even care [soylentnews.org]. Of course, the everyday American terrorist is invented and handed weapons by the FBI, so encryption doesn't even come into play because so much other evidence is available to convict. These cases pad the terrorism numbers that politicians/LEOs use to scare the public, and in turn erode more civil and digital liberties.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:38PM
In large cities, displaying the Apple logo is a status signal, their market share in the big U.S. cities is vastly larger than nationwide/worldwide. They WILL buy Apple even if they have to cross a bridge or a tunnel over into NJ. So if Apple doesn't play ball this ain't going nowhere. I mentioned Samsung because they are #2 and would give Apple the cover they need to not be the lone holdout, plus they aren't an American company. But in the end it is all about what Apple does, just like everything else in the tech world post Microsoft.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nerdfest on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:50PM
If the media would stop effectively giving them billions in free advertising the wouldn't be the case. They're behind in usability, features, and value. They're ahead in marketing, and because of that make *immense* profits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @12:18AM
The Lucent Public License's New York clause is what kept the company I worked for from adopting Plan 9 for what later turned out to be a very successful platform.
The (east-coast) lawyers took one look at that paragraphed and said it's a can of worms we can't afford to open.
(Score: 1) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:43PM
Considering that encryption algorithms exist in the open, how does legislation like this have any benefit at all?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @07:57PM
It allows law enforcement to gain easier access into legally or illegally seized smartphones carried by the low-hanging fruit out there.
What % of the population knows the difference between encryption algorithms or that their NY phone could have a mandated backdoor in it?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday January 20 2016, @04:46PM
Okay, but the vast majority of people, criminal or not, have no clue how *anything* works on their phone. All they have to know is "download this app and the cops can't see your stuff". I mean, people don't know how adblockers work either, but they're installing them -- so much so that it's starting to have an effect.
Anyway, I guess this confirms what I expected, that is, that both the police and the legislators have no clue how any of it works either, and are therefore unaware how meaningless this legislation is.
(Score: 5, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:01PM
Here's my Barney level explanation:
I watch you, you vote me,
we're a happy family
With a Kardashian or two and a Trump on the tube,
Won't you bend over and take the lube.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 19 2016, @10:57PM
NY hasn't thought this through, have they? Phone companies don't need NY's business, because they can go elsewhere and business will follow, but NY does need their business if they want tax dollars and jobs. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Also, another lesson for stupid government: banning something doesn't work unless it's enforceable. This goes for piracy, drugs, guns, knives, etc. The people who are going to use these things to commit crimes are going to do so without regard to whether they are banned or not (and banning them will not lower supply because all of them are trivially easy to make/obtain), so if you cannot enforce the ban, you are just depriving law abiding citizens' of their rights for no reason. How are you going to stop people from using non-backdoored phones from outside of NY? Oh right, you can't. Well then.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 20 2016, @11:38AM
According to the bill, its sponsor is Walter Mosely, whose district spans Ft. Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, and parts of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Those neighborhoods adjoin mine in Brooklyn and I know them well. They're predominantly African-American and well-educated. There are, however, significant minorities of Orthodox Jews in Ft. Greene (Satmars) and Crown Heights (Lubbavitchers) that he might be playing to here, using this as an anti-Muslim measure because those groups love to hate on Muslims. It's not generally the case that African Americans hate on Muslims that I've seen, probably because the most famous black leader after Martin Luther King was Malcolm X, a Muslim.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 20 2016, @03:04AM
That's New York values, for you!
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 20 2016, @03:23AM
Any smartphone that is manufactured on or before January 1, 2016, and sold or leased in New York, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider. (Reformatted from original to remove caps lock)
So any smartphone manufactured after 1/1/2016, i.e. right now, does not have to be capable of being decrypted and unlocked? How does that work exactly?
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 20 2016, @03:31AM
ANY SMARTPHONE THAT IS MANUFACTURED ON OR AFTER JANUARY FIRST, TWO THOUSAND SIXTEEN, AND SOLD OR LEASED IN NEW YORK, SHALL BE CAPABLE OF BEING DECRYPTED AND UNLOCKED BY ITS MANUFACTURER OR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER.
Apparently the process of reformatting to remove caps also means changing the wording and meaning of the text.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 20 2016, @03:27AM
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 20 2016, @11:20AM
The comments from the New Yorkers on the law at that site are suspiciously cogent and polite. Are you sure that site's from New York and not secretly from Alberta?
Washington DC delenda est.