I think that should be forbidden.

We have a legal principle in most countries that you can't be forced to testify against yourself or against family, or that the court can't use illegally obtained evidence. If we were just interested in solving crimes above all, we wouldn't have those restrictions. Why don't we e.g. make the punishment for not confessing or denunciating equal to the punishment for the crime itself?

In the same vein, I think there should be a restriction in place in principle. Your stuff cannot be made to work against you.

The police should not be able to remotely stop your car via software. And more importantly, if you have any implants like a pacemaker, the police should not be able to use that to incapacitate you. It's entirely concievable that at some point there will be a hostage situation where the criminal has an implant, and somebody will come up with that plan.

More general, as "stuff" is becoming more and more intelligent, we should be able to trust our stuff. I think it is a fundamental value in the modern "information society" or "IOT world" or "industry 4.0" or what you might call it.

The idea seems crazy at first, but the more I think about it, it is right up there with free speech, or the idea that my wife can't be forced to testify against me. (Or, controversially, the right to bear arms - and I say that as a liberal who is for strict gun control! - but I think the sentiment is related. When the government goes out of control, some people want to rely on their guns - I think that is not realistic, and harmful for society - but I just want to be able to rely on my laptop, to be able to write subversive content without it ratting me out!)

There are already court cases that affirm that anything you store in the cloud is not subject to 4th Amendment protections because it's not on "your" hardware. WTF? We get conned into buying into all this cloud bs and then they turn the tables on us!

Why all the downvotes against the parent? Please don't downvote opinions you disagree with - challenge them.

> Because 'your' printer, and its manufacturer, [and the Secret Service,] are hostile to you [counterfeiting money].

Finish your sentence, please :)

That was the original purpose of the tracking dots. I don't think it's at all surprising that an intelligence agency would co-opt a law enforcement identification mechanism.

There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law.

> There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law.

1) It prevents nothing. It is about post-facto detection.

2) It is self-evidently hostile to the law-breaker.

3) Whether or not it is moral to break the law is the relevant question, and that depends on the law. The "original purpose" of this tech hardly matters. Ask the authors of Soviet-era samizdat.

> There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law.

It all depends on how they do it. There are plenty of hostile things that are done in the name of law enforcement.

How can you counterfeit money with an inkjet? You'll get caught in days (wrong paper, streaking, poor quality print) with or without the dots. You'd have to be blind not to notice the difference, but then you'd feel the difference. Heck, you could hear the difference. Smell the difference. Troublesome counterfeiting is more sophisticated than a $100 throw away printer.

The Stasi took fingerprints of every typewritter so people couldn't publish illegal things. This is not hostile only if the state is defined as non hostile.

> There is nothing "hostile" about preventing individuals from breaking the law.

Shall we all be clockwork oranges, then? The only ones allowed to have free will shall be the ones that programmed us to vote them into the legislature every time?