Let's say a law like this did get passed. How could it even be worded?
For example, if it merely says "you have to give the cops your password when a judge tells you to" then using a password manager should technically protect you, because you don't know the password and have no way of retrieving it.
They could add "or the password for your password manager" but then the judge would have to say "give up all of your passwords", not just the one(s) relevant to the investigation.
Either way, the law would also have to say "and don't change your password(s) until the investigation is over" or "and give the cops a copy of your password whenever it changes".
Even then, you'd only be getting the people with 1) nothing to really hide or 2) so stupid they would have gotten caught some other way anyway because all a criminal would have to do is set their data to permanently lock, or self destruct, when the cops enter the fake password the criminal turned over.
The only way this could work is if the cops could just straight up compel you to assist in your own investigation. They can already do that by tricking you, so I don't think this would add much.
It's much simpler than that. A judge orders you to give police access to your account. Regardless of whatever labyrinthian setup you use to unlock the actual credentials, and barring a stay of the order pending appeal, if you do not give police access you will be held in contempt of court and you may be sent to prison until such time as you comply with the court order. Claims of "but technically I don't actually know the password" are going to impress a judge as much as an argument of "but technically it was the bullet that murdered him" would.
But what if you set your system up with plausibly deniable encryption? Say you encrypt two data sets, one with perfectly legal data, the other with the secret incriminating stuff. How will law enforcement be able to tell you gave them the key to the innocent data only? Block cipher output is indistinguishable from pseudorandom numbers. Deniable encryption is not a new thing in any way.
Edit: How would this be different from police saying "we know you've gone out and buried something, a neighbor saw you leave with something heavy and a shovel", and then you give them a location where you've buried something innocent (a long way away from your secret criminal stuff)?
You could setup a complicated series of plausibly deniable encryption, steganography, and so on and I suppose that might work. But you need to maintain perfect opsec as well as hope they don't already have sufficient evidence that you possess the information they're after. They might have already installed a keylogger plus covert video surveillance and your denials are now contempt of court plus obstruction of justice.
In your burial scenario, they might already possess video surveillance of you dragging a body into the woods, then leaving 30 minutes later but they'd like you to provide an exact location to avoid an extensive search. Telling them you went to the beach with your metal detector won't bode well.
Maybe it's much more of a social decision than a business decision.
Early stage investors are gambling even more than late stage investors. The best they can hope for is to find 50 reasonable deals and let the math work itself out.
So the better part of their decision could easily be based much more on what their peer early stage investors think of them. Founders with pedigree are easy to justify and obviously more socially valuable than founders without pedigree (like buying IBM). So being the angel who keeps getting those founders means other investors will look up to you.
And, if things go wrong, nobody can blame an investor for getting into bed with pedigreed founders. It's an obvious decision, so it won't invite ridicule. Since it's obvious, there will be more competition, and that's something the angel doesn't have to rely on luck to win.
LOL, you see "a staggering amount of waste" in commercial entities and thing the way to find efficiency is to look to the government? Like government-sponsored research is going to be more efficient? That's a good one.
Basic research is exactly the kind of thing that markets are bad at doing, so it really wouldn't be surprising. Which country do you see as a model of the success of privately funded research? As far as I can see, all countries that are making significant contributions to science are spending lots of government money on it.
"Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark.
That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything?
That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."
It's disingenuous to claim that because a new feature isn't making your life better means he's failing at making the whole world better.
Maybe you're one of those 10-100K experiments where some engineer pushed something out to see if it worked. Maybe a new feature boosts revenue so they can build solar-powered internet planes that bring entire cities a connection. Maybe it's just noise and isn't actually relevant.
Why would their body language have anything to do with the content you were hoping for?
Yeah, the title is a bit more grandiose than just "Sam interviews Mark." I thought it was good. It's a huge topic that has hundreds of thought leaders so it's not like you should be expecting something mind blowing.
For me, it was valuable because the whole "building the future" thing is still very much rooted in existing institutions. Outside of Silicon Valley, everybody "knows" that if you want to do something really big you need a government or corporation to do it. Everybody believes it's impossible for one person or a small team to create an impact. It's good to remind people that Facebook is changing the world, but it started in a way that lots of people could start.
