Posts tagged law

There’s a young woman in my class who is both smart and highly motivated. (Actually, there are several people like that.) This last year she led a campaign to make prostitution illegal in Rhode Island, and succeeded. I was always curious about why she was so passionate about it, though. Whenever she talked about it, she rarely spoke about the business/institution/practice of prostitution. Instead, she spoke about Human Trafficking a.k.a. slavery.

While both topics have a connotation of less-than-moral, they’re still quite distinct and I wasn’t quite sure how they overlapped. Certainly, slavery can be used to “employ”** prostitutes, but slavery can also be used to “employ” farm workers. Arguably, the conditions surrounding undocumented immigrant farm workers are just as bad if not worse than those surrounding legal prostitution in Rhode Island. Why campaign just against prostitution? Why not campaign against undocumented/coerced farm workers too?

(Just to be clear, since I do expect to be misunderstood here, I am morally and politically opposed to slavery in all its forms. I believe it to be wrong, I think its already illegal, and I believe that it should be illegal.)

(I’d like to point out that I’ve never interacted personally with the person who prompted this blog entry. I know nothing about her except what I’ve heard from her during lecture discussions or observed visually.)

I think I’ve figured out why. She, like I, is opposed to human trafficking. She is also, separately, opposed to men having sex with women. That sounds absurd, but please read just a few more sentences before you think I’m making an ad hominem attack.

I took a course on feminism during my last semester in undergrad. The professor for that course, who was a fantastic professor, was married and had one child. Her husband and her split the child care responsibilities. She worked Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and he worked Tuesday, Thursday, and either Saturday or Sunday. Or something like that. On days when she was at home with their child, she would make dinner for her and her child. She deliberately would never make enough for her husband to eat when he got home later in the evening. She was already making dinner, and already cooked for two. However, she deliberately never cooked for three. On purpose.

Her husband would come sit with them at the dinner table with a bowl of cereal.

Since she teaches a feminism course, you can probably guess that she is a feminist. Her blind opposition to traditional roles was so strong that she not only avoided the role but avoided the appearance of the role. Since women have traditionally made dinner for their husbands, she now refuses to make dinner for her husband even though she is already in the kitchen making dinner. There’s something not quite right about that. (Her husband does cook for her.)

I think that my classmate’s opposition to prostitution is feminist in nature, and not merely a moral objection to slavery.

Why does the nature of her opposition matter? It matters because of her choice of what to campaign against. She campaigned against one thing, while using rhetoric directed against another thing. The arguments in favour of subjugating men as “pay back” for their historical subjugation of women are completely different from the arguments in favour of stronger slavery legislation. That, in turn, is significant because there isn’t as much support for the subjugation of men as there is for anti-slavery legislation. Not only would virtually all (but not absolutely all) men be opposed to male-subjugation, but the vast majority of women would be similarly opposed.

FileVault was introduced in Mac OS X v10.3, if I recall correctly. Basically, it replaces one’s home folder with a disk image, which is mounted during login and unmounted at log out. The idea is that the disk image is encrypted, and so therefore your home is encrypted. At first, this sounds like a fantastic idea: real data security. However, there are often misunderstandings about what this does and how it works.

A fundamental requirement of any encryption system is that it fails closed. What does “fails closed” mean? When something fails, what happens? If a door lock fails, then its either stuck open or stuck closed. If stuck open, then you can’t lock your door. If it fails closed, then you can’t unlock your door. The goal of all encryption systems is to fail closed. If anything is tampered with, then the contents are inaccessible. Only a working lock (disk image) with a working key (password) can be unlocked. If it ever failed open, then anyone could just come along, smash the lock with a hammer, and walk in.

So, you’ve probably already realised why this is a problem for users of a consumer operating system on a consumer computer. If you drop your laptop, then your hard drive is damaged, then your lock is damaged, then it doesn’t matter if you still have your key. Worse, what if you lose your key? Worse, what if your lock breaks by itself during one of the myriad occasions when a consumer operating system or a consumer computer fails by itself? (I’m not talking hardware failure, but simple application crashes, kernel panics, unexpected sudden power loss, &c.)

The result is that, unless you have some reason to be significantly concerned about data theft, your concern for data loss ought to outweigh all possible motivation for turning FileVault on.

Sadly, we are talking about consumers here. These people don’t backup. Their fear of windows viruses produces an unreasonable desire to turn on anything labelled “security”.

Therefore, FileVault is often a cause of complete, catastrophic data loss.

Well, if you do backups, for example using Time Machine (properly), and you don’t forget your password, and you understand that encryption systems are designed to fail closed, then there aren’t really any down sides, even though FileVault is admittedly often a cause of catastrophic data loss.

I turned on FileVault because I don’t want anyone to get my data if they steal my computer. I don’t want my login details (even though the passwords are encrypted) recovered from my keychain. I don’t want my financial details recovered. I don’t want my personal files recovered (not just pr0n, but also personal e-mails &c.). I recognise that I must now log out in order for my backups to happen. I recognise that I must be more careful about where I save enormous files (such as my iMovie Events folder or disk images of any software I purchase). I recognise that even if I’m extremely careful, my home might be corrupted anyway and I’ll have to restore from backup.

OK. It’s worth it. I don’t want anyone to be able to report what brand of pr0n I like. Not just because of the embarrassment it may cause, but because of the misguided social constructs which govern any sort of public behaviour and which have been enshrined in the ethics requirements of my profession. (I have a whole other essay on why “ethics” requirements are anything but.)

Postscript: Of course, Apple has taken steps to ensure that FileVault is less troublesome. Starting in Mac OS X v10.5, Apple introduced a type of disk image called a “sparse bundle” which breaks the disk image itself into hundreds of tiny files so that the chance of file corruption causing complete data loss is much lower. The sparse bundle format also serves to separate some of the metadata from the file data to improve fault tolerance.