Recent Comments

attack helicopter post http://i.imgur.com/7OhiCJ2.jpg

Q: How was Tay created?

A: Tay has been built by mining relevant public data and by using AI and editorial developed by a staff including improvisational comedians. Public data that's been anonymized is Tay's primary data source. That data has been modeled, cleaned and filtered by the team developing Tay.

#about" rel="nofollow">This explains a lot.

The twitter account is https://twitter.com/TayandYou - some tweets have been deleted. No doubt someone kept a complete history and will publish them in due course.

people ordering everything online shipping at flat rates or weight only has led to overloading the shipping network.

There is no limit to "the shipping network". They can easily hire more employees, build more processing facilities, etc. You can easily see the interstates aren't so clogged with trucks that one more couldn't be added. And the decline of coal in the US has left railroads with plenty of new extra capacity they haven't been able to fill.

various companies now.charge by weight and size.

There's nothing new about that at all. "Flat rate" shipping has and always had quite a few strict restrictions on weights and sizes.

The Australians have been calculating postage this way for a couple of decades.

As have all the US shipping companies, for as long as I can recall...

Not until it's been milked. Also see "the Cloud," an idea whose time ended nearly 40 years ago...

This is why shipping prices have increased by 5% and 10%. Hundreds of thousands of people ordering everything online shipping at flat rates or weight only has led to overloading the shipping network. Buying a small item results in much larger packaging. We are literally moving air around. To combat this the various companies now.charge by weight and size. So, if you send a parcel that is quite large but relatively small in weight you pay more due to the size. The Australians have been calculating postage this way for a couple of decades. The down side is that when prices increase like this they rarely decrease.

Isn't that fad like over now?

This would finally make all those smart watches useful though, right? Being able to hear a private call with the actual watch instead of relying on a speakerphone or a Bluetooth earbud.

I finger my phone every day

".. and after 11 years and 4 billion dollars the MyGov project is deemed to be a success. IBM will now hand over the reigns to Accenture to finish the project in less than six months for a small fee"

Can you come up with one?
I'm somewhat reminded of the time IBM were contracted to build a computer system for the New Zealand Police. There were constant spec revisions that went on and on, until IBM said "We can't work like this." The government sued them, and I seem to recall they (correctly) lost.

This feels like it is missing something...

I'd also add that physically entering a residence to look through papers, leaves an obvious trail that is difficult to hide. Electronic devices don't leave obvious traces when someone, like the FBI, has decided to trespass, so it's infinitely easier to secretly surveil someone, possibly without court oversight.

Everyone knows the FBI is lying, bald-faced. They are perfectly capable of breaking into the terrorist's iPhone in question, but instead choose to use this opportunity to gain more legal authority to compel Apple, and other companies, to give them easy access they can use whenever and however they decide to do so. There is no way to prove to a piece of software whether you are authorized by a legitimate warrant, FISC, secret national security letter, etc., or not.

==
As I recently wrote on the old site:

The US was founded upon fear of an excessively powerful central government, as the British crown was seen massively abusing their power. So strong protections were built-in that weakened law enforcement for the benefit of civil liberties. There have always been other systems of government that are slightly more effective at catching or prosecuting criminals, but Americans knew, for hundreds of years, those trade-offs weren't worth it.

The limiting of government power was so ingrained that the US seems to be the only major nation without a state broadcaster. Outside the US, everybody in the world knows the VOA, but they are NOT allowed to operate inside the US at all. We believed the ability of the current government to directly influence the electorate, was too much power and control to give to our representatives, and settled on allowing only operation on foreign soil, with aggressive protections against even incidental domestic operation.

A warrant, today, gets the FBI exactly the same information it did 50 years ago... They can tap and record all the calls that occur after the warrant is issued, get a log of all previous calls that were made, etc.

Computers have made US law enforcement lazy. They expect they can get a warrant and will automatically be handed an archive with the contents of ALL of your communications for the past several YEARS. The information they got with a warrant decades ago is no longer good enough for them, and they're going to insist on the power they've gotten accustomed to, and refuse to allow privacy to make a comeback.

Remember, it was only a year ago that the entire contents of your phone were siphoned off by the police whenever you were pulled over just for speeding. This was done under the laws that allows them to look for weapons in the vicinity that you might be able to reach for, and which got extended to allow into evidence incriminating documents that just happened to be found in the process of searching for weapons.

And what did the police do with their gigabytes of all your personal information they siphoned off your phone? Maybe look for patterns of terrorism and drug dealing? No. Why they instead thought it would be a good idea to look for any nude photos you might have, and share them with their friends. Hooray for law enforcement keeping us all safe!

The San Bernardino case is pretty damn obviously worthless, too. The FBI has already FAILED to protect the public. The shooters already carried out their attacks, and were shot dead. FBI and Homeland Security failed miserably to identify them as threats, despite there being ample publicly available information to identify them as ISIL sympathizers. It's the same story as the 9/11 attacks all over again. Homeland Security had MORE INFORMATION than they were able to process and deal with, yet they use attacks as a lame excuse to expand their power, their budget, and get access to much more information, which again, they don't have any hope of being able to process in a timely manner.

Homeland Security has become better and better at revealing details after the fact, but is still useless at identifying individuals who pose a threat before they can carry out their plans to murder people. Apple unlocking iPhones for the FBI is more of the same... It won't possibly help identify future threats, it'll just be a little bit more information the FBI can publish about their past.

This was settled back in the early 90s with the PGP case. Code for encryption programs falls under the constitutional protections of freedom of speech. A new federal law or court ruling cannot override constitutional rights. Without the overwhelming support needed to pass a constitutional amendment (which nobody believes the US Fed can possibly hope to manage these days), they can't legally stop the export of software, including encryption, from the US.

This is the trick PGP used many years ago to get around export restrictions, and they were eventually successful in court:

Export Regulations only covers software in electronic form (e.g. on disks, or via the Internet). PGP 5.0i, on the other hand, was compiled from source code that was printed in a book (well, actually 12 books - over 6000 pages!). The books were exported from the USA in accordance with the US Export Regulations, and the pages were then scanned and OCRed to make the source available in electronic form.

This was not an easy task. More than 70 people from all over Europe worked for over 1000 hours to make the PGP 5.0i release possible. But it was worth it. PGP 5.0i was the first PGP version that is 100% legal to use outside the USA, because no source code was exported in electronic form.
http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/

First amendment rights favor Apple on the opposite side of this issue, as well. The EFF supports Apple, on the basis that forcing Apple to cryptographically sign software for the FBI under court-order, is tantamount to the government compelling a person to say something, against their will.

It's a shame Homeland Security has gone so far the wrong way. Part of their purview is to help IMPROVE our domestic security against attack and interception by foreign governments. Under a cloud of public suspicion, the NSA improved DES back in the early days of encryption. They added trusted features to Linux and released SELinux to the public. etc. Now they're all about destroying what they used to build, as they have decided their own power to domestically spy is more important than the security of the nation against foreign adversaries. I suppose without a strong and looming existential threat from a nation-state like the USSR, we all too quickly forget our own disturbing history of government abuse, and lose our sense of priorities.

The fact the former CIA and NSA direct Michael Hayden is outspoken in his opposition to the FBI's request, should be a clear indication that the FBI is making our country less safe as they overstep their authority.

The US government has shown repeatedly that, constitutionally speaking, their understanding of the words "unreasonable" and "probable cause" was definitely not the same as mine. That's enough for me to argue on an ideological basis.

The local resource location doesn't work for Firefox on Linux.

File not found

Firefox can't find the file at resource://firefox-at-ghostery-dot-com/ghostery/data/options.html.

Check the file name for capitalization or other typing errors.
Check to see if the file was moved, renamed or deleted.

That that fricking page has googleanalytics

In Firefox, after installing Ghostery, clicking on the Preferences button in about:addons shows the internet page https://extension.ghostery.com/settings

A sane presidential candidate? Surely you jest. Anyone sane would not want that job.

Not soon enough. Not anywhere near soon enough.

His phone probably is secure, and only a redundant container of data stored elsewhere. I'm fairly certain that everything the president does is saved and archived for various reasons.

The security is anti non authorized access. That's all he wants for everyone else too. A warrant says that the government has access to the data in the device. Its a system we've had in the constitution since the beginning. I'm really baffled at why people oppose this on an ideological basis. On a practical basis, I understand the argument that once there is a way for the government to gain access, that could open up access for everyone else as well. But thats the only argument that makes sense.

When combined with the FBI's plan" to root out all terrorists by having schools report students who criticize the government, I'm starting to think that the slippery slope is long over, and we're now looking at the endgame.

Says the man with the most secure phone on the planet ... http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Obamas-BlackBerry-This-is-how-it-is-secured/articleshow/45948345.cms

For example I sexually identify as an iPhone. Check your privilege.

So, there are only two viable, sane candidates...

Presidential candidates and their stances on encryption.

Maybe in the US. Not around here. Touch their car and you can be done for vehicle damage.OTOH, push the damn thing into the middle of the road in the middle of the night and it will be gone quickly the next morning.

Hollywood are now so concerned that people don't know about these new sites they are actively advertising them: http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/piracy/graham-burke-is-a-man-on-a-mission-to-end-piracy-in-australia/news-story/e8ca3752f1951cab29e87d850ad15e14

We have an irc channel? I never knew!

Also, if someone parks a vehicle on your property without permission, you can generally get it towed (and impounded) by the city or county at no charge to yourself. In fact, once the cops arrive they won't let the equipment's owner take it without your permission, so it's up to you if you want to punish the culprit: Tow charges and impound fees can total well up in four figures.

A friends feed of what? Articles they like? Comments?

In the stream feature of the site, you can see a single individual's stream (here's mine) of articles that they have modded up, but combining the streams of all your friends could be a neat addition that I'll look into.

As for the IRC home, a #pipedot channel on freenode was very briefly occupied two years ago, but was abandoned once soylentnews started their own IRC presence and became much more popular.

Try asking them a whole lot of intrusive questions, and they start to get a bit squeamish on giving you the details, though. Apparently a faceless government minion is trustworthy, yet someone they trust as a friend is not.

It is quite concerning just how readily businesses are willing to comply with Big Brother.

Most definitely, but not just businesses - people in general. Not just comply, but demand to be oppressed.

It is quite concerning just how readily businesses are willing to comply with Big Brother.

Let's all sing "They were asshats after all" to the tune of "It's a small world". Ready? 1,2,3,4

Don't fret, in news that renders this story outdated, amazon have returned encryption in Fire OS.

Just... why...

The war did strange things to us all, son. I carried this gold watch...

pipedot should just transform into a web based user forum(s).

It should be easy to pull the work permits that the city issued for all of the work to determine who is at fault. That might be a difficult process, but it can be done.

Try it and see?.At least tails now has blueray ripping built in

I wonder how this will compare to:

Tails
Whonix
Qubes

Gasp! You bastards! That millionaire's kids have to get their prada allowance from somewhere! Beast!

that's NOTHING! I carry around 5 256GB flash drives and 1 3TB hard drive IN MY RECTUM!

I'm not sure it would be that super.

Here in Aus we can only afford for one company in the entire island to do this work, badly: the NBN! Trying to install a fibre network in AU since 2009 (and failing big time!)

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a kangaroo pouch full of hard drives, hopping across the outback...

We're supposed to get fibre to the home, rather than just the cabinet. My brother's neighbours get 800 megabits, he only gets 250 on a good day. If he turns on his broadband Sky, which his ISP claim won't impact his network speeds at all, he drops down to 50 megabits or less. (I suspect he's mixing up connection speed, and network transfer rates.)

Our ISP is a state-owned one, who were well known for shady deals and typical big-business reasoning. Their CEO went on TV around 2008 and complained that opening up the market to competition was unfair, because they'd be forced to compete in areas where they made the largest profits and that just wasn't fair. Didn't even try to disguise what she was saying.

Here in Aus we can only afford for one company in the entire island to do this work, badly: the NBN! Trying to install a fibre network in AU since 2009 (and failing big time!)

Well FTTC (fiber to the cabinet) is much more common than FTTH (fiber to the home). It's not an issue per se, it can still deliver speeds of 100Mb/s - 400Mb/s depending on the configuration. They don't use just one cable though (not because of the speed, the theoretical capacity of a fiber cable is somewhere north of 1 Pb/s, well above of what your ISP will power it with), the reason why they use multiple cables is because fiber cable is quite fragile and you don't want to end up redoing miles of cabling because you were stupid enough to just use 1 cable. It seems to me that your local electrician might be exaggerating the story.

In Dunedin, New Zealand, we "won" a marketing campaign called Gigatown. It was supposed to present us with the fastest internet in the southern hemisphere, we would have gigabit and we would have it first. Nobody else would have it until well after we did.
It turns out that the competitors of the company installing it have finished a half dozen towns, at least one of them much bigger than Dunedin, and the company installing it here - Chorus - have completed installation in a bunch of smaller towns. I'm told by a local electrician that Chorus are doing a terrible job, instead of doing fibre to the door of each house they're splitting a fibre cable between houses, something which they'll have to redo across the entire nation in a few years, and are refusing to guarantee their connection speeds with some people experiencing xDSL-like speeds.
Anyway, we've got construction crews running up and down the street, stereos blaring from very early in the morning until the end of the day, digging up holes, blocking roads, low speed zones, that kind of thing. It's annoying as all hell, but nowhere near as bad as that crap!