Silk Road forums

Hadn't noticed that one was gone yet. That brings the total of confirmed deleted threads that I am aware of to 5: 3 on the NSA , 1 on phone encryption/anonymity and 1 on quantum encryption.

As KMF mentioned, there is some stuff you can do with virtualization to isolate OS hardware access.  However, the host OS is still going to be able to detect both drives or the virtualization software wouldn't be able to provision it to the guest OSes.

In general, there is nothing you can do (outside of physically disconnecting the cables) that is somehow going to prevent hardware from being seen by the main OS installed on a system.  It sees whatever is connected to its systemboard via the different ports.

Actually you are right. The host cannot use a device while it is passedthrough to a guest VM (ie: you cannot have the host use the same graphics card that you passthrough to a guest, it would need to use its own) , but it can still detach it from the guest VM and then use it (meaning that the host can break the isolation). So the OP will need to have two xen virtual machines and a known as non-compromised host that is used for nothing other than Xen, and which has no networking code present on it. He will also need three hard drives, one for the host, and one to be passed through for the first VM and another to be passedthrough to the second. He would also need a third xen VM with a network card passedthrough to it, for all of the other VM's to route through to gain access to the internet. This is essentially describing Qubes btw.

+1 for pointing that out, my original description was misleading (because the host can access the passedthrough hardware, it just needs to detach it first).

it's more than probable that different people reach a maturity where they can give meaningful consent at different ages. But let's assume that no 11-year-olds are mature enough to give meaningful consent to sex, and that all normal 18-year-olds are mature enough. So all people reach that point somewhere between 12 and 17. It seems reasonable to assume that very few 12-year-olds can meaningfully consent. It also seems reasonable to assume that almost all 17-year-olds can meaningfully consent. So the line probably belongs somewhere between 13 and 16.

Shockingly 'somewhere between 13 and 16' happens to be 14.5, which is the average age that complete sexual maturity is reached!

Sixteen is a pretty good place to draw the line. Yes, some 15-year-olds may be mature enough for sex, but I would rather have a law a little too harsh to protect the 16-year-olds who aren't, than too lax and fail to protect the 15-year-olds who aren't.

I would rather have a law that is lax enough that normal men are not victimized to a far greater degree than a 14 year old girl who *chooses* to have sex with an older man would be. Who do you think is more fucked, the 20 year old gets caught sleeping with a willing 14 year old, or the 14 year old who willingly slept with a 20 year old who got caught? Anyway why don't you care about the percentage of 16 year olds who are not mature enough for sex? Because there are less of them? What is the number of people that you are willing to fail to protect? Shouldn't we just keep increasing the age of consent, as every additional year it increases will 'protect' more people? Or at least raise it so high that those who are not protected are only those who never would be capable of meaningful consent in any case? Maybe the U.S.A. should increase its age of consent to 21, like Madagascar, in order to protect all of the vulnerable (possibly 17), 18, 19 and 20 year olds!
 

I think the age of consent should be lower (maybe 13 or 14) where the people involved are similar in age - as I don't think the criminalisation of teenage sexual activity is necessary, but should remain the same where one party is much older - to prevent coercion from more powerful adults. The sort of age difference I am thinking about would be about 5 years.

And another arbitrary line. What power has a 20 year old got over a 14 year old that a 19 year old doesn't? It sounds like you rolled dice to come up with your morality system.

2.) Even if you were right (and you couldn't be more wrong), you are committing the genetic fallacy -- that because you can point to the origin of my beliefs, you have thereby refuted them. The supposed social origin of my beliefs has no bearing on the truth or falsity of my assertions.

Your claim that your beliefs are based on morality allows me to prove that the assertions derived from your beliefs are subjective rather than objective, if I can show that your sense of morality is derived from cultural conditioning. As you yourself have said, societal norms are completely irrelevant to objective right and wrong. Demonstrating that societal norms have a causative rather than correlative relationship with your sense of morality would thus demonstrate that your sense of morality is completely irrelevant to objective right and wrong.

No, I think, ideally, age of consent laws should be abolished, and all sex should be within the confines of marriage - a view that is  completely out of place to the values of my community. But I think in the culture that prevails today, age of consent laws are desirable for pragmatic reasons -- they are, as I have said, one of the last defences against sexual degeneracy. S

And there you go sounding like a religious neoconservative again.

Only to your conception of anarchism.

I am pretty sure that anarchism and "the government decides when you get to have sex" are mutually exclusive.

If your processor supports VT-d or IOMMU you can do this with Xen and SATA passthrough. Without VT-d or IOMMU you cannot virtually isolate hardware though.

Essentially this configuration allows you to have multiple virtual machines that have direct access to (different) hardware, and to lock a specific piece of hardware to a specific virtual machine (so that even the host OS doesn't have access to the hardware anymore). I imagine this is what you meant and not something like dual booting right? PS: You can even game on a Windows VM with almost no performance penalty if you PCI passthrough a graphics card to a windows guest.

I don't think it is 100% perfect though, because there are theoretical attacks where the attacker, for example, reflashes your video card in such a way that it attacks your system during the boot sequence. But it is 99% perfect .

I agree, if the administration prefers we do not talk about the NSA here I don't mind, I just want to know if that is official so I can avoid spending more time posting in  threads that are destined to be deleted. I would also humbly suggest that maybe a sticky or something be made on the topic, so people know about it, rather than keep finding their posts and threads deleted and left wondering why. I suppose it does seem like the common theme in the deleted threads so far is the NSA, although in the case of the anonymized telephone thread the NSA was not mentioned in particular.

I suppose that they could be being moved to sub forums that I don't have access to, but it seems that they are being deleted as my post history doesn't show that I have posted in any of them. I did make a reply to the original NSA thread that ended up being moved to off topic and not deleted, but the OP reposted the thread and PMed me that it was deleted again. The other threads are either being moved into a sub forum I don't have access to or they are being deleted or dropped from the database somehow. I was a bit surprised honestly, considering there was absolutely nothing controversial in any of the threads, and I have never seen threads deleted here before, but over the past couple of days there have been at least four that vanished. Two people have talked with me in PM about it and they also have the impression that the threads have been deleted. At first I figured it might be the OP deleting the thread, but I was informed that OP can only lock the thread, and in either case one of the OP's took the initiative to inform me that he did not delete it and asked me if I knew why it had been deleted.

Good explanation KMF.  +1

Thanks, I updated the original post slightly to clarify a few things. It is also best to keep in mind that I am far from an expert on quantum computing and am not even a cryptographer, so this explanation is to the best of my understanding (although the only part I am uncertain about is related to Shors algorithm and how much increasing bit strength of traditional RSA hinders it. I am essentially positive that it hinders it somewhat, but from D.J.B's pdf it seems like it doesn't hinder it enough to make it realistically quantum resistant, and that multi-prime-RSA with a massive number of 4,096 bit primes is required, but that is just what I have deduced from his paper + the fact that Shors Algorithm has already been run on quantum computers to factor small numbers).

If I had to take a semi-educated guess, it would be that the number of stabilized qubits required grows linearly with the bit size of the primes in traditional RSA, but that it is expected that it will be computationally infeasible to use RSA with more bits than there are stabilized qubits after the number of stabilized qubits continues to exponentially grow for some number of years into the future. Multi-prime-RSA may still be feasible for quantum resistance if enough primes are used, however rather than being completely computationally infeasible it is simply impractical (requiring multiple hard drives to hold the key).

1.) as it is impossible to assess every case on an individual basis, a line does have to be drawn somewhere. That line may be arbitrary,  but there's nothing arbitrary about the morality that justifies drawing a line somewhere. In the same way, there's nothing arbitrary about the idea that children shouldn't be recruited to serve in the military, even if the minimum age to enlist in the military is itself arbitrary. You are confusing morality with the practical, legal application thereof. Morality is not arbitrary or artificial; the legal application of moral principles may be arbitrary to some extent, but only by necessity.

I am actually not entirely against a system where people are qualified as capable of consenting. It is possible to qualify a person for a drivers license on an individual basis, I don't see why it is not possible to qualify people for ability to consent on an individual basis. It wouldn't make much sense to say that everybody of a certain age can drive, would it? The only reason I am against such a system is that it seems to involve a centralized authority, and I am against the idea of giving some arbitrary bureaucratic agency the ability to determine who is capable of engaging in sex, just as I am against the idea that the government decides who is capable of driving on roads (rather it should be decided by private road owners). On the other hand, it isn't as if we do not already have a centralized authority determining the age at which a person is capable of consent, it seems better if they decide these things based upon individual evidence of competency rather than arbitrarily.  I never said that the morality that some sort of qualifier is required to engage in sexual activity is arbitrary, rather your specific qualifier is arbitrary, it is artificial and it is a recent social construct as well.

I think there should be a legal age to buy alcohol, to do drugs, to join the military, to work, etc., etc.

Do you pull these ages out of your ass as well?

2.) My argument has never been along the lines of, "because there is already an age of consent, there OUGHT to be an age of consent". That is a strawman. I have appealed to moral principles, not the current laws and norms. As I have repeated several times now, morality (as distinct from ethics) is independent of the norms of society.

You answered the question "why 18 instead of 17" with the claim that a line needs to be drawn somewhere, without further clarification this is apparently synonymous with saying "because there must be some age, and the age is 18, the age ought to 18".

3.) I never said the line should be drawn at 18.  I think it should be 16, and the older party should be within five years of the age of the younger party if the latter is under 16 - thus, a 15 year old could be sexually active with a 20 year old.

This seems to be arbitrary as well. What is so special about 20 year olds that makes it so that they can have consensual sex with a 15 year old, but a 21 year old cannot? And what is so special about an 18 year old, that they can have sex with a 13 year old but a 19 year old cannot? Do you think that a 13 year old is capable of consenting to sex with an 18 year old, but on the day the 18 year old turns 19 they suddenly possess some exploitative power over the 13 year old? Or that the day a 12 year old turns 13 they suddenly gain some wisdom allowing them to engage in sexual activity with an 18 year old without it being exploitative? Your logic is apparently arbitrary, or you believe in some magical process that takes place on certain birthdays (am I the only one who notices a pattern of people associating magic to sexual things involving those under the age of 18?), or perhaps you do not take issue with consent at all but rather have some other driving motivation to prohibit certain people from engaging in sexual activity with certain others.

A line has to be drawn somewhere.  Unhealthy and promiscuous sex can have a corrupting effect on any individual regardless of age.  But young suggestible minds are especially prone to corruption and exploitation by adults with dark or selfish motives. We have a human and spiritual nature, in addition to our animal nature. There are those who want to drag young people down to the animal level, to degrade them, deny their spiritual nature, and thus malign the created order.

You say a lot of things without qualifying them. What is unhealthy about a 14 year old sleeping with a 20 year old that becomes healthy if the 14 year old becomes 15 before they 20 year old becomes 21? Does a 20 year old not have the same power of suggestion over a 15 year old as a 21 year old does?

That's a self-serving argument not a principled one. I freely admit that I am an ephebophile. However, I make a distinction between my own desires and what is morally good. The fact that you keep appealing to the sexual desires of "most men" as a justification of sexual activity with minors suggests that you fail to grasp such a distinction. Your argument, nakedly stated, boils down to: men are attracted to underaged girls, therefore it is morally right that they should act on their desires. You will have to come up with a better argument if you want to convince anyone of the truth of your assertions.

I actually quite explicitly stated that the sexual desires of most men are not moral justifications, when I pointed out that most men are evolutionarily programmed to rape but that rape is immoral. The core of my argument is that people who can consent to have sex with each other should be allowed do engage in sexual relationships with each other. I suppose that we must then define what consent is.

Consent is not just the ability to agree to do something - a five year old can be asked to engage in sexual activity and proceed to do so, however it is apparent that they do not have the ability to consent. The reason we would say that the five year old cannot consent is due to the fact that they do not comprehend the implications of what they are being asked to do. A bomb could be placed in a box with a button on it, configured such that if the button is pressed the bomb explodes. If I hand a person this box and ask them to press the button, it does not mean that they consent to be killed if they press the button. Consent requires a well rounded understanding of the potential consequences of a taken action. 

Consent is not just the taking of an action while understanding the potential consequences of the action. If I place a bomb in a box as before, although this time I explain the details of the scenario to the person whom I ask to press the button, they have not consented to press the button if they only do so because I am holding a gun to the head of one of their loved ones. Consent requires a true desire to take an action, independently of external coercion. This is not to say that a person cannot take actions they regret having to take to reach a certain goal. For example, a person who has a desperately impoverished family but who also has a life insurance policy, may have a true desire to commit suicide in order to provide for their family. They can consent to be shot even though they would prefer not to be, because their desire to provide for their family outweighs their desire to live. The difference is that, in the case of the intentional suicide, the person took action based on their own cognition (ie: the idea to commit suicide to save their family arose from their own mind, and was not forced upon them by the malicious actions of another). Admittedly the distinction is hard to qualify, however I believe that we can agree that consent requires a true desire to take an action and that the desire can not have been brought to be by the rights violating activity of another person.

I believe that this enough to define consent. Consent is the taking of an action, while having a reasonable understanding of the potential consequences of the action, while having a true desire to take the action, without the desire stemming from the malicious rights violation of another party. Thus we can conclude that a person is capable of consenting to sex if they have a reasonable understanding of the potential consequences of engaging in sex and they still desire to engage in sex of their own free will. The reason rape is immoral is because inherently somebody who is raped does not desire to be raped of their own free will. Even if men are biologically programmed to desire rape, it is immoral to rape for the previously stated reason. A five year old is incapable of consenting to sex because they are incapable of having a reasonable understanding of (and appreciation for) the consequences of engaging in sexual activities.

Your five year age gap clearly shows that consent is not the issue you have with underage sex. If a 14 year old is capable of understanding and appreciating the potential consequences of sex, and they still decide to engage in sexual activity of their own free will, then they are capable of consenting to sexual interaction with a 30 year old just as well as they are capable of consenting to engage in sexual activity with a 19 year old.  My argument is that a 14 year old is capable of knowing and appreciating the potential consequences of sexual activity as well as naturally biologically programmed to desire to engage in sexual activity of their own free will. A five year old is not biologically programmed to desire to engage in sexual activity, any desire a five year old has to engage in sexual activity is going to be a desire that comes from coercion (and additionally a 5 year old is not capable of understanding and appreciating the potential consequences of engaging in sexual activity). In addition to a 14 year old being able to understand and appreciate the potential consequences of engaging in sexual activity, and being biologically programmed to desire to engage in sexual activity, males are biologically programmed to desire to engage in sexual activity with 14 year olds (as per my previous logical analysis of males desire for youth and fertility), and therefor it is not immoral for adult males to engage in sexual activity with 14 year olds.

Ethics should focus on the virtue of an agent, on what makes a person virtuous. The purpose of virtue is to tend towards the Good.  The cultivation of virtue elevates us above the level of animal existence to the human and to the divine.  Having sex with underaged girls tends pulls them down to the animal level; it is a movement of the will towards the finite and materialism. We should be cultivating their virtues instead, rather than using them to satisfy our sexual desires, which corrupts both them and ourselves.

And again you like to use words without defining them. What is virtue? What makes a person virtuous. What is the property of being virtuous? Something that tends towards 'the good'? What is the Good then? I assume the Good is the expression of virtue, since that would complete your circular logic. I also don't see anything immoral about the finite (whatever the hell you mean by that, I suppose), and I definitely don't see anything immoral with materialism. Also, 14 year olds also have sexual desires, as they are biologically programmed to.