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U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 0 points 1 month ago (7 children)

sure, people are storing images and passwords on light switches and power strips. you have lost your fucking mind.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

    You absolutely can though. A 16x7 grid of light switches can store any 16 character password that uses the ASCII character set. Images would require many more switches (depending on the color quality and resolution) but it's the same thing. Like I said, earlier, you are having an issue making a point to differentiate between the position of a binary switch and a single bit of data because there is no fucking difference in the first place.

    You make it sound ridiculous, but we've stored data as a magnetic polarity for decades at this point, we've stored data on rocks, laser etched as dots and dashes at a microscopic level on thin bits of foil. Whole programs have been written and stored on stacks of cards. Heck, the programs to get a spacecraft to the moon were written on paper and then literally knitted into the onboard computers. Regardless of the medium chosen, (almost) all computer memory and storage is simply the representation of an array of binary states, something that can be done, and has been done with a simple array of light switches.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (5 children)

    like I said,

    good. get back to me once people are using light switches to store data.

    in practice. on the daily.

    you are trolling. I'm out.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Exactly!

    Maybe you finally get it. The premise that altering the position of a switch is legally destruction of property is patently ridiculous. Altering the position of a 16x7 array of switches and calling it destruction of property is also ridiculous. So why is altering the position of an array of billions of tiny switches suddenly destruction of property?

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    lets demonstrate why. Because I would alter the structure of your atoms, and that would not be criminal, because why would it be. I would alter the structure in a very specific way, but that's not a crime.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (2 children)

    Because I would alter the structure of your atoms, and that would not be criminal, because why would it be.

    On it's bacsic premise, no, you're allowed to move my arms or person (to the extent that it is not assault, kidnapping, etc) but say, altering the state of my atoms in a way that ends my life or does me physical harm is criminal.

    So your point is not explicitly correct there, more detail is needed. You've also (either knowingly or unknowingly) built and argued against a strawman. My claim is that altering the position of a switch is not destruction of property, and that as the law as written explicitly criminalizes the destruction of property in response to a lawful search. Altering the position of a switch could be considered destruction of evidence, and by extension so would wiping the phone. I don't know if there is a law that explicitly bans the destruction of evidence during a lawful border search though. So it could still be criminal, but there is significant reasonable doubt that any property was actually destroyed.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    On it's bacsic premise, no, you're allowed to move my arms or person (to the extent that it is not assault, kidnapping, etc) but say, altering the state of my atoms in a way that ends my life or does me physical harm is criminal.

    see! there's nuance! not everything is a useless sea of light switches. there is no problem with squishing a grape, but there is a problem with causing similar physical harm to living beings

    My claim is that altering the position of a switch is not destruction of property,

    switches are like grapes. digital storage in your phone is like living beings. something that is not easy or possible to reproduce the same way it was before the damage.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago

    No, digital storage in your phone is like ghosts playing a interdimenional clarinet when you look at the quantum tunneling aspects of an infinite universal wrap-up around rejected improbabilities of unstable bilateral states.

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