Recent Comments

I think we are talking a bit at cross-purposes. What you say is 100% true. If I have a goal I'd try everything to convince as many people as possible. To do that I would use whatever promises me the most success. However, on the receiving end of such a manipulation attempt I don't care what makes sense for most people. I want to know what the goal is. And the goal is not internet surveillance. This is only a means to an end. So, what is the goal?

Hmm... your point of view is valid. But there are others. For instance you wrote:

Or if they are funded by a large oil company and do climate research...

Yes, people have reasons to fake research results. They may be paid to do so. They may do it to get funding and/or fame. Those reasons are equally valid for religious and not religious people. However, unlike Atheists and perhaps Agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists can have an extra incentive to fake results. One more kind of temptation. So statistically one should be more careful about what religious people say.

Of course, this is only statistics, there should not be an automatism to dismiss their research. There is no Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist hive mind. Cheating is always done by an individual.

On second read, maybe you didn't understand what I was saying at all.

You have a goal X. Right? You want to convince people that X should be done. So you do your research and find reasons 1-5 in support of your argument to do X.

Argument 1 will be supported by 99% of people it makes sense.
#2 65% of people will agree
#3 40% of people will agree
#4 20% of people will agree
#5 5% of people will agree.

So the best way to convince people to do X is to focus on #1, without even mentioning 2,3,4 or 5.

Make sense? I thought you understood what I was getting at. But your reply continues to argue 2,3,4 & 5. So maybe you didn't.

There are billions of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists and Agnostics. I wouldn't automatically dismiss any research by any of them. Nor would I automatically trust it because it came from one of them.

Now, if I have more information about a particular group an individual comes from, I can certainly do that. Like, if it comes from The Institute for Creation Research I'm not trusting anything they say. Or if they are funded by a large oil company and do climate research...

Not quite true, but also not quite false. Do you think that you can get a terror group, which is capable to utilize an abandoned nuclear submarine or poorly secured nuclear weapons, by snooping around in peoples private lives? Causing an economic disaster without leaving very visible traces, which cannot be followed without a general internet surveillance should be even more impossible.

Btw... terrorism was never as easy as today. One short trip to certain African countries could even the dumbest terrorist provide with enough material to do real damage. But again... Nothing which can be prevented or solved by playing big brother.

Want to save lives? The lightning argument is too weak? Put more cops on the streets. Pay and educate normal police better. 14,772 murder cases in 2010 in the usa. But of course it is much more important to fight to prevent the 15 terror victims a year.

it is four times more likely to be killed by a lightning bolt than by a terror attack.

The counter-argument to this is that the number of people killed by lightning is by nature fairly steady. The realistic worst-case for lightning deaths isn't that scary.
The worst-case for terrorism, however, is extremely serious. A 'bad year for terrorism' might involve abandoned nuclear submarines, poorly secured nuclear weapons, economic disaster, etc.

He (and Comey) are clueless figureheads with cushy jobs paid for by taxpayers. The FBI's own website recommends the use of encryption by mere users. Comey admits he isn't smart enough to know the difference between a backdoor and a front door. They're PR flacks at best.

The outgoing head of GCHQ swore up and down that there's no way their people would engage in mass surveillance, and that's true. They have the NSA do it for them, and they do it for the NSA.

Meanwhile, the DHS is pulling panty raids to shutdown trademark infringers, the FBI manufactures terrorist plots, and Congress just keeps on renewing the Patriot Act because, ... Who knows why?

Get a warrant, or STFU! Lazy, ignorant sluggards who can't be bothered with doing real police work. They swore an oath to defend the Constitution, yet I doubt they've ever even read it.

True. Or course I don't agree. And yes, if this were all I said, it would be quite lame. But I think I also explained in detail, why I don't agree. Don't you have a response to that part?

Well, of course *you* don't agree. In related news, Mohamad Ali, and your younger brother both think they are the greatest: film at 11.

I don't agree. One of the most important parts to expose extremists is to discover their motives. For a general internet surveillance there are not too many possible motives, which justify that kind of effort. Especially since it is not very popular.
As I pointed out, terrorism is not a sufficient explanation. There are far too few terror acts and most of them are
unorganized and not of the kind where internet surveillance would help. So not much of a career move here.
Child porn? More or less the same. Drugs? Sure, the small time street dealer has to coordinate with his upstream provider
when and where to get his next delivery. I am sure this is done by email. Most other types of cyber criminality leaves a money trail. Those can be followed even now. Fear of a revolution? Democracy works quite well. Most relevant countries have at least two parties. If one becomes unpopular, the opposition gets a chance. Masses are mollified. Rinse repeat. So the upper 10000 have nothing to fear. Snowden prevention? Maybe, but those attempts to control the net are much older than the Snowden even.

Now, if you factor all this in, tell me, what remains as motive? What remains where internet surveillance actually makes
sense? Where it could work? Who is willing to invest millions of $ to lobby lawmakers? Who is willing to stifle upcoming new
business models, which could create a new boom, e.g. like the vcr did when it become popular? Who does not care about
public appearance?

You started off so beautifully in that post before blowing your foot off with a shotgun with the last couple of sentences. Just leave well enough alone. You have 99% of your potential audience convinced,then with the last sentence or two you introduce unrelated subjects which then fracture the cohesive and diverse audience you just built.

How about not having ones consitutional rights violated with complete wanton disregard...is that a right? How about having congress spied on and then have the spies lie about doing it...until they are caught? One might think congress would have some constitutional rights but it's gone so far not even they are safe.

Mr Hannigan is an extremist and proof that better surveillance does not help against extremists.
Everyone who tries to erode civil rights is an extremist. But people are dumb. How many people
die in car accidents every year? According to Wikipedia: 32,999 in 2010 in the USA alone. How
many terroristic acts? How many died in terroristic acts in 2010 in the USA? 15 people.
According to:
http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terrorism-should
it is four times more likely to be killed by a lightning bolt than by a terror attack.
I doubt that in other countries the ratio is much different.

Would internet surveillance help to prevent terror attacks? Hardly. And I suppose the whole population
has to be monitored to solve, who did the last/next school shooting.

Again: There is only one 'crime' for which an all-over internet surveillance is necessary: Copyright violations.
Ok, to a lesser extend libel. But certainly not terrorism, drugs, or child porn.

You learn something Gnu every day

Didn't know that - thanks!

Yeah, but its powerpoint. Its not a service that's accessible 24/7.

The words you are looking for is Best of Breed or Industry Standard. For CMS this is Drupal or Sharepoint or Confluence. Dominant stack means that your business uses multiple, usually all, products needed from one vendor. So a Microsoft dominant stack will mean than new servers will be Windows Server instead of Linux. Sharepoint instead of Drupal. Even if Drupal is better. Other dominant stacks include SAP, IBM, CA, GNU/Open Source.

The Register is not the sort of thing that a PHB reads. I've never seen a MS hack in anything mainstream, but the I would be so happy if I was wrong about this.

Sure seems like the exploits by big vendors' software make a pretty big splash too - there sure is a lot of press about the latest Microsoft hacks - The Register.co.uk for example has a field day with "Patch Tuesday."

program yourself easily with fresh tampons in the butt

That's what really gets me about these recent exploits. They get tons of publicity, but similar ones from the big proprietary vendors are kept quiet. So now my PHB thinks that security is only an issue with OSS.

Somehow my contacts were already in my new phone when I went to do the import.. not just the ones that were on the sim card..... and I was using a new gmail account for it. ?!?!? It freaks me out what these anti-social companies think they have a right to do... just because they hide it 40 pages into a eula.

Link to Soylent here, with the Powerpoint story: http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/11/03/038209

Oh, and before Microsoft pats itself on the back, there's a vuln going around now that uses freaking Powerpoint as a vector, so Microsoft isn't free and clear yet either:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/22/powerpoint_attacks_exploit_ms_0day/

Powerpoint, fer Chrissake. How long have we been dealing with this? Adobe, same thing. So tired of updating Adobe products.

Drupal is pretty darned dominant though, in the web content world, anyway. I know Wordpress is probably the biggest one out there but Drupal is probably second I'd think, or not far away from the top, anyway. But on /. and elsewhere, wherever a Drupal thread comes up there's an instant reaction from people who have programmed for it, and they complain it's a hairball of spaghetti code. Maybe this was a train wreck in the making and anybody who knew the code knew sooner or later it would happen.

Still, how would you like to be the person responsible for writing a security announcement that goes, "unless you've patched recently, you have probably already been compromised?" That's got to be pretty uncomfortable.

So does Google. My phone started bothering me to turn on autosync something or other and as soon as I figured out what it was doing I shut it the hell off. Lots and lots of pictures going from my phone to Google and some of it becoming available via G+ or something (or at least, being at risk of that happening) made my blood run cold. I don't want anything autosyncing ever, unless I set it up myself. I saved a stupid from Reddit to my Downloads folder on my tablet, and later found it synced to my Android phone a bit later - WTF? Not what I wanted, and good thing it was a stupid cat picture and not something else ...

Not happy about this new autosync world - I know it's being portrayed as a convenience but to me it's a way bigger risk than it is a convenience.

I cringe to think what it would be like if this was a piece of a dominant stack like Microsoft or SAP

I won my first job by being able to geek out the resident God thanks to you. Hours spent on unix graduated to BSD gained me employment when it was getting tough. I am awash with remorse over having to move to mainframe. It was the money. Job stability. A need to move state. A moment of unstable mental decisions cursed many a time but now long in the past. Thanks. For existing. From all of us.

I decided to give dropbox a go for its autosync feature. Worked great. Take a picture or video and the file would sync to DB if there was internet connectivity. Great. After a while I stopped using it and decided to clean up a bit. I found 1GB of personal photos had been uploaded from the SD card. WTF? I knew that new photos would sync but had no idea 1 GB of my mobile plan was blown on those photos. Luckily those days I had 3 GB quota. If it happened today I would be paying hundreds in excess data charges. The part about semi nude pictures of me being uploaded without my permission also bothers me. Now I have my own cloud.

I'd been using a BSDish stack for a few years in NextStep. I was connected to the internet via UUCP most of the time
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.mail.maps/5-xMfc8c52g/FxBTw1P2V5UJ (frsvnsvn). I had no interest in the intel architecture at the time, but I was glad to see the progress.

Looks like a bit of advance planning went into that one - nice work! The only thing that costume is missing is Sigourney Weaver at your side. Yeah I know, she wasn't at Venkman's side; just looking for an excuse to go to a party with Sigourney Weaver.

I would've put a mini-keg in the backpack and squirted beer out the nozzle. Next time!

Guess these kinds of growing pains are expected in an industry that's sort of remaking itself, but it's been a pretty tough week for fans and proponents of space travel.

Interesting article, but not germane to |. I'm afraid.

I've taken the liberty of posting it to the dictator.* hierarchy though (sadly, the d.asia newsgroup since there are too few oceania posts to make a dedicated group worth it). Read it on Usenet or at http://forum.dictatorshandbook.net

Perhaps, but the poll does not specify to what decimal point. So, fresh from the atm ready for a night on the town I have $100 in my pocket with a drivers license and a credit card to keep it company.

Not much since some prick melted it in lava. We should commission another to be made.

I'd give you a couple dollars for the battery, speaker, mic, and motor. Not worth much, but it's something.

What *is* the going rate for The One Ring these days? ;)

That air and lint has to be worth something, right?

Form ate the url http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/30/how-one-mans-private-files-ended-up-on-apples-icloud-without-his-consent/

Let us know if there's much to it beyond the soundtrack. Me, couldn't be arsed. ;)

How did you get from $130 to $100 to $200?

Ack. Brain failure. Read that as $1 :-)

It's just a common dumb-phone I picked up while I was out traveling on business, It is probably not worth anything; why do you ask?

I've decided to download the satanic one and give it a try just to see if it can convert me to Satan.
Version 666.9 based on Ubuntu 10.10. Oh no. They have a sense of humor. Using the Undead CD/DVD. Looking forward to this.

I was looking forward to seeing what the evil world conquering delusionalists came up with however http://www.ubuntume.com/ is marked as a domain for sale

The local name for this is the Internet Tax.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/secret-government-briefing-admits-metadata-law-cost-and-warns-of-internet-tax-campaign-20141030-11e1v8.html

Metadata stored about a phone call could include the parties to the call, location, duration and time of the call, but not what was said.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/government-shelves-controversial-data-retention-scheme-20130624-2oskq.html

On The Drum tonight: The AFP Commissioner admits data retention laws could be used against illegal downloaders, the Government moves to force a vote on its Direct Action plan and Nova Peris tells Parliament the release of her emails were part of an attempt to blackmail her.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-30/the-drum-thursday-october-30/5855562

The figure came from iinet. Next time google it before getting upset.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/australian-data-retention-plan-will-cost-consumers-130-year-says-iinet-2014-8

Australian consumers could be paying more than $10 a month extra - $130 a year - just for internet access under the Government's data retention plan, announced yesterday by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, as part of new counter-terrorism laws.

Modelling by Australia's second biggest internet service provider, iiNet, on the expense of retaining metadata for two years will cost the company an additional $130 million a year - $10 million for electricity alone - which will be passed on to consumers.

Back in 2007, a Scaled Composites rocket engine test killed three people and injured three others:

http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/3854