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Lenovo installed adware called Superfish on all the computers they shipped.
Superfish intercepts your communication to websites, even encrypted ones, to see what you do and inject whatever they want into your communication with websites (such as add an ad, append some tracking information, etc).
Superfish can intercept the encrypted website traffic by creating SSL certificates that pretend to be the site you are trying to access, and then forwarding your traffic along. Normally, these certificates need to be signed appropriately, but Lenovo/Superfish secretly added their signature on the computer as a valid signature for all websites.
These signatures are tied to a password, and the Superfish software needs to know the password to sign certificates with it. That password is in the application and can easily be extracted, which means any can create a fake certificate, pretending to be superfish, and anybody on an affected Lenovo machine won't get any warnings. |
yes, because when you bring your computer in, they totally won't be instructed by corporate to ask, "would you like us to run a simple and inexpensive virus and malware removal service on your device while it's here? HOW CONVENIENT IS THIS AMIRITE?"
49.95 please |
Omg yes all three of these things.. Me and one of my friends graduated the same year same major same grades. I graduated and took the first shit lab job I could find and stuck it out for two years fast forward 5 years after college I'm just shy of that six figure mark.. He refused to work a "shit job" was unwmployed for a year ended up having to work as a janitor in a hospital for two years and ended up finally working the job that I took off the bat... |
That's pretty much the question of the decade over here in the states. Nobody can decide WHO should give WHAT authority to the NSA. Not that it matters, because the NSA has blatantly ignored every check & balance put in place for them.
[From the Wiki:](
>Despite President Obama's claims that these programs have congressional oversight, members of Congress were unaware of the existence of these NSA programs or the secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, and have consistently been denied access to basic information about them.[66] Obama has also claimed that there are legal checks in place to prevent inappropriate access of data and that there have been no examples of abuse;[67] however, the secret FISC court charged with regulating the NSA's activities is, according to its chief judge, incapable of investigating or verifying how often the NSA breaks even its own secret rules. [68] It has since been reported that the NSA violated its own rules on data access thousands of times a year, many of these violations involving large-scale data interceptions;
It's a complete clusterfuck that should have every citizen shitting their pants in fear of 'what could be'. But oh look, there's a fight on the telly and right after that I need to catch up on what the Kardashians are doing.
You're absolutely right, there's zero reason to expect that the NSA would not spy on a country/citizen/diplomat/etc. |
Worst build to date. Constant out of memory errors (never had any with win 8 or any win 10 tech preview to date). Mail application crashes seconds after opening. Start menu works half the time. Settings is getting worse and worse (lets clump 1000's of settings under 8 generic categories)
Possibly the worst is how the new IE browser makes itself default and you can no longer click the "make this default" button on your favorite non-ie browser, you are greeted with a popup telling you to go to a deep control panel and set defaults there.
Sigh, windows 8.1 was decent in terms of stability and functionality - if they just put the windows 7 start menu back properly and then made the 8.1 interface an "option" for tablets, we'd be done. |
Is there an app for you to shut the fuck up? If it's |
Hi, I've spent a number of years freelancing and also teaching front-end web design and development, and though this is about Flash I thought I'd weigh in with some observations.
I get the impression a lot of freelance web designers fail to properly inform the client of what their best interests should be. Granted that occasionally clients will be profoundly stubborn and attempt to strong-arm you into producing their misguided visions, but I often see scenarios where this happens because the designer doesn't know how steer the client's ideas (or maybe they don't want to bother). A new website is often an exciting prospect for a client, and they are usually keen to make suggestions or tell you what they think it should be. In reality they are normally regurgitating their experiences with other websites they thought were cool, with little or no regard for how it might apply to their own site (something I see all the time).
> I want the menu to look like a pie chart and hover on the screen and be done in Flash. [1]
The reality is that the client usually doesn't specifically want that - that is just their answer to the question "how do I make my website stand out from the crowd?" Often, the trick is to produce something sane and then explain how that will accomplish their goal. If they're particularly excited it's important to first talk them out of the idea.
I've found a great way to approach clients initially is to elicit their aims. Nothing to do with the L+F of the website, but what role the website will play in growing their business[2]. From there you should be able to determine the nature of the site's content. Don't ever talk with them about design and layout before producing the prototypes. If they have a company palette and logo and all that, you might need to work within those constraints, but determining the design shouldn't be something they are involved in. |
If you are looking to build a new PC, an want to spend over 700 on it. Make damn sure you at least get a ddr3 compatable motherboard. If buying intel, make sure you get an LGA 1366 socket motherboard which means a core i3-5-7 processor. As far as GPU's I believe the common opinion is that ATI is dominating nvidia as far as price/power are concerned. |
Yea verily; for the cake is the work of the grand deceiver; whom hath leavened his bread with the spongiform risings of duplicity ! Truly; his works crumble into naught but dust and ashes.
Long may the pie last; may its crusty exterior protect the juicy goodness within! |
The goal of operation payback is to deal a blow to paypal by getting a large enough attack force to DDoS it and cause financial problems. They've stated explicitly that they want to hit paypal where it hurts; the wallet. That's just corporate terrorism and I don't see how doing that will help the net neutrality cause.
Keeping wikileaks running through infinite mirrors I support. Attacking a financial institution where the end game of the attack is to make it lose money is just asking for this whole cause of ours to be cast in a terrorist light in the media. That is the last thing we need, wikileaks is already getting a lot of exposure and right now I think it's good because it is garnering some support and generating debate. By doing things like attacking a credit card company, that was coerced by the government to refuse donations to it, wikileaks is then shown to the masses as an anarchistic website. I do support the idea to actually comb through the leaks and expose the truth though. |
I wonder if we'd have even better email privacy if the courts ruled that "unencrypted email's just like a post card that everyone who touches it can read it -- if you want privacy, put it in an envelope==encrypt it".
IMHO this ruling is a big step backward for Encrypted Email.
I'd rather trust a technological solutions for email privacy than a policy one.
I can't believe how many tech companies don't mind that their competitors (many tech companies compete with some parts of google or microsoft or at&t, etc) have unencrypted copies of their emails.
And it's the false expectation that email's safe that lets people do this.
And this court ruling tends to re-enforce that impression. |
The scam is the place you bought it from not letting you return it even when opened. Thats some bullshit right there. The only products I've seen that typically cant be returned after being open is software/games and thats just due to the fact that you could still be running the shit after returning. |
Well, my take is this: If they had both catalogs fully streamable and fully mailable then it's ok. You pick, you choose one or the other or both.
But to be forced to pick both to get what I effectively have now - a way to get everything via mail and/or streaming, is a bit cost prohibitive. |
They are not allowed to stream within a certain timeframe after a DVD's release because the publishers are worried it would eat into DVD sales. IIRC they also have to get special permission for older stuff to stream it. |
I've always thought about this. This being, how money rules everything. So, lobbying is done in Washington by lining pockets of politicians with RIAA/MPAA/Oil money. And I thought, there are millions of us in america, that can contribute 10...20... 50 dollars. And we are serious about our futures. So if we were to bribe the politicians that are being bribed by the companies, we could possibly win them over.
I'm not saying we are bribing Wikipedia, but what I am saying is we are showing that money can win, even for good. Imagine this catches on, and other companies move from GoDaddy and it becomes something they advertise! "Not only do we NOT support SOPA, but we no longer associate ourselves with companies that do. This is why we moved to another hosting company" -=) I really love the effect users on Reddit, have, on the freaking world. I feel warm and fuzzy inside, like I ate a puppy. |
The first registrar I had got gobbled up by someone else, it was either enom or someone who enom then gobbled up. In any case, the company that acquired it had a different system for domain management and account management.
I guess they just imported all the account info from the old company's database, but I had a long password with special characters, and something fucking terrible happened in the process. So weird shit would happen, like my password for my account login (for billing) would still work, but my password for my domain management, which should have been the same thing, did not work, because it told me I couldn't use special characters in my password and that the length could only be like 8 letters or something. When I requested an email with my password, I got email confirming that the password I was trying to use was correct, but the site wouldn't let me enter it. I couldn't contact their live support because I had to be logged in. I couldn't change my password because I had to be logged in. I could never reach anyone by phone. I finally got it resolved right before my domain expired.
Now I've been using HOST PC, and almost lost my domain because of a fuckup on their end. They are supposed to auto-renew my registration so long as I have credit on the account. So before my domain is about to lapse, I put in a bunch of money for the credit, but they don't autorenew, and my domain lapses. I catch it right away by re-registering it, but now the domain shows up twice as two separate domains (named the same thing) on my account. One of them is the original, which lapsed, and one is the re-registered domain.
So, the one that lapsed is showing as canceled and inactive, but because that same domain is also still registered to me, they've decided that they must have paid for it and that I owe them money, so they've locked me out of management for the domain and keep sending me invoices stating that I owe them the cost of renewal registration, despite the fact that I already had to pay for a new registration due to their incompetence. I've tried opening support tickets explaining exactly what happened, with detailed timelines, receipts, and screen shots, but their customer support has been rude, tells me I waited too long to notify them of the issue and that at this point I just have to pay up, and they just close the ticket. I tried re-opening the ticket because the issue hasn't been resolved, and they told me if I kept doing that they would disable my ability to contact their support.
It hasn't been a huge problem yet because despite the fact that I'm locked out, I haven't needed to change anything, and everything is still working. But this problem has been ongoing for 2 years now, and my registration will be over in another 2 years, and I'm worried that I won't be able to transfer it because I'm locked out of domain management so I can't get the transfer authorization code without giving the double payment they're insisting on; they are holding my domain hostage. |
Im not entirely certain a world democracy is a good idea. Just look at the states, and the problems they have, because they are so big and span so many varying cultures. Just the North/South divide, especially to do with the bible belt.
No imagine a world democracy thats global and has to work with cultures as diverse as the West and East.
Not to mention, at the moment, if you REALLY REALLY REALLY disagree with something the government is doing, but cant vote in someone else due to being a minority, you can always try to move to a differant country, and hope its government is better.
Not so much if theres a world democracy in place. |
No, its not simple, but for a lot of people who have given up hope on their home countries government being fixable, the work of getting citizenship elsewhere is worth it.
Getting into the US is a lot easier if you can prove discrimination in your Country of Origin. And not everyone wants to get into the US. Europe is rather popular at the moment, especially with Americans who are fed up with the corporate and personal corruption in the US gov, but feel that the system is too broken to fix. |
Can someone |
When speaking about the speed of a network connection, talking about bytes per second is meaningless and confusing. Dividing a MB/s number by 8 to get a Mb/s number is only going to get you an even more meaningless number. There is so much going on between the physical layer and the software layer that it's hard to even know how much data actually has been transmitted. |
Mb/s divided by 8 gives you MB/s.
For me, at least, it makes more sense when I look at it as MB instead of Mb. |
I see googles sales strategy. They are using the Cartman approach.
Hear me out.
1) They come up with a product
2) Build the hype by making it exclusive.
3) Slowly expand the service till people are begging their friends for invites or hook ups.
4) Be praised in the media as innovative as everyone who has access is super jazzed to just be in the hook up that all they can say are good things.
5) Open Beta access to Everyone.
6) ???
7) Profit!
Then Again I'm Canadian so I won't see an opportunity to join for about a year and a half and only at step 7. |
It kinda is.. Water, electricity and internet is all "included" in the rent. There is no way for me to rent an apartment here that doesn't have internet, so it's $0. I don't pay any extra for the internet connection, or the usage of it, thus, $0/a month :). If I could say that we don't have any need for the internet, so could you substract $50 from our rent, then you would be right. |
Agreed, however, they need a worthy competitor, none of this bing bullshit that no one wants to use... another small startup is where their competition will come from, one whose goal isn't to "be bought by [x]". One that makes google sweat.
It might need a few startups that cooperate, providing interfaces to each other, so users can use the separate services but also have all their data available in each one. That's what google is turning into. Multiple applications where your same data is available across all of them.
I use flickr. And twitter. And facebook. Other than that, I'm pretty much google's bitch. Chrome, Gmail, G+, Google Drive, etc, etc, etc.
But if they weren't so appealing to also be my internet service provider, it's fine because that would mean the other options are more appealing. However, most of them cost too much, don't provide good customer support, and are total assbags from what I hear. I have FIOS at home, pretty happy with it, but it is expensive.
We have to get to the point where you could swap in a service and not have to get a giant dick in the ass. Oh, you want a cell phone? $100 a month and also, 2 year contract... now bend over please. I just swapped hosting providers... granted I had to set up another server, but I went from $100 a month to $22 a month. Great service at $22 a month as well.
If we aren't happy with service / price, there should be an option other than abstinence. If we aren't there, it's corporate rape, because the entry point for starting one of these companies is so big. However, if we have a big guy on our side, they can force the prices lower for everyone, and there's no need for building an alternative.
But then when the big guy on our side turns a little bit evil, we're in trouble.
Overall I agree with your statement. I just wanted to type for a little while. Thanks for reading. |
It sounds like this is one guy in New Zealand who is familiar with support for one kind of business who happened to convince his superiors, or strong armed them, into believing that Google is the end all be all of everything.
They don't seem to understand that there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many different types of industries who require many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many different software solutions for various reasons that include but are not limited to restrictions set by management, restrictions set by law, or limitations set by how production/manufacturing is done on the client side. |
Five years ago a friend tried to gift me a song from iTunes. Since I was running Windows, I had to install the iTunes app before I could get the song. I tried this three times over the course of an evening. It never worked. I finally bought the song on Amazon and sent my friend a thank-you note. |
r/politics even out jerks /r/circlejerk by large margins. I fucking hate the shit that is going on. You can barely express your opinion without being down voted. I expressed why I liked ME3 in /r/gaming (wrote 200-300 words) and I got down voted to hell. If I went to /r/politics to say who I think would lead USA best, I would get down voted and get death threats. |
No, the 30 pin connector does not have "more" functionality,the functionality is just different. USB can accomplish EVERYTHING the apple 30 pin connector can. The only difference is that Apple chose a hardware driven interface (each of the 30 pins) instead of software (USB + drivers) to communicate with accessories. The 30 pin connector is also bigger, proprietary, and gives them a monopoly on their device accessories.
The only advantage to the Apple consumer is that accessories may be smaller/cheaper because they don't have the hardware overhead required to communicate over USB. Hopefully an EE can confirm this? |
You can't count it by the population. It would be per household. There are approximately 109 million occupied houses(out of 125m) in the US.
We also have to consider Google's current costs. $300 construction fee for 'Free Internet'. $70/mo + No construction fee for Gigabit Internet. Or $120/mo + no construction fee for Gigabit Internet + TV.
Now lets say that around 60%(65.4M) of the households would actually switch to Google Fiber.
About 30%(19.6M) of these households would go for the 'Free Internet' Option. So with no monthly fees and only the $300 construction fee, that would give Google about $5.8 Billion .
Now we have 70% left of the original 65.4M households which is about 45.8M households. Now we have to divide this again because not everyone would get the TV option. Let's say about 30% of the people stick to just 'Gigabit Internet' and 70% would get the 'Internet + TV' option.
So 30% of 45.8M is about 13.7M households. With $70 a month and no construction fee that comes up to $959 million a month and $11.5 billion a year from 'Gigabit Internet' subscribers.
Now the rest of the 70% of the 45.8M households is about 32M households. So at $120 a month, Google would earn $3.8 billion a month and about $45.6 billion a year .
To a total that comes up to almost $63 billion in one year that Google would earn . For the years after that it would be $57 billion per year .
It would take Google just under two years to make $100 billion.
These are just estimates of how much they would make they actually had the money to install it in so many places.
You also have to remember that Google has about $45 billion to spend and it's annual CAPEX budget is actually 10 times lower than that at $4.5 billion. If their budget stays at that, it will take them almost 22 years to actually get Fiber to half of the US households unless if they got a loan.
So don't get to excited for Google Fiber, it's probably not coming to you any time soon.
edit* |
That is true, however, it still works in the favor of the business, actually more so if you'll just follow me on my magical journey of words.
They spend the $1 to mail you on Facebook. This mail is already considered a targeted advertisement expense because they can figure out that you like sweaters, so Sally Sweaterman is going to offer you a deal on sweater. You log on to the website, and buy something, thus making an account.
Just like that, they have your email address (of course you can fake it, but that's a risk Sally is willing to take). That $1 investment to make it into your Facebook inbox has now yielded at least $15...seeing as sweaters ain't cheap.
Sally has now made about $10 in gross sales after you remove the cost of the Facebook email, and the cost of paying someone to send it (or set up a python script). You figure she spent $3 on the sweater, and about $3 more on the cost of shipping and processing the order. Sally's business has netted $4 in profit from the $1 expense. |
Teaching only one language is terrible, but that's rare (and if anyone reading this is at a college/university that teaches only one language, GTFO). That said, Java is one of the best languages to begin on because it's fairly easy to learn, allows a broad set of experience, and doesn't permit as much violation of proper system engineering principles, e.g. proper use of design patterns, as many less-strict languages like PHP, C++, etc. do.
It's also an extremely good language in terms of scope (lots of great frameworks and libraries), enforcement of design and best practices, portability (though other languages are/have caught up), and, in my opinion, maintainability and readability.
I spent that past ~8 months programming primarily in PHP and Javascript. Those languages can be very powerful, but our codebase is a mess because there were too many developers with very different backgrounds and ideas.
We've started coding a service layer (SOA) in Java, and I had forgotten how much I prefer it over scripting languages. We've got handling our internal use of MVC and also as a means to automate request handling (mapping a URI like "somewebsite.com/get-user/?id=5" takes 5 minutes and 2 lines of annotations - doing it manually could take tens or hundreds), so the actual work we have to do is relatively minimal. You could do something similar in other languages, but it's rarely as simple and clear-cut as with Java (annotations) or C# (decorators/attributes).
And FWIW, ** Oracle has released a patch that fixes (hopefully all) the exploits. It also sets the default security to 'High', i.e. user confirmation rather than auto-run . |
Both of the two major companies (AT&T, Verizon) have made these claims on multiple occasions. A simple Google search to the effect of "AT&T claims data is expensive" generates close to 5,000,000 results - most of the forerunners being news articles citing these claims made by these carriers' CEOs, CFOs, etc. Most of this originated with the first generation iPhone in major metro hubs such as San Francisco, NYC, etc - that demonstrated AT&T's 20 year old network was egregiously out dated, and that to meet consumer demand they would have to upgrade their network, and continuously reinvest in maintaining their network instead of simply maximizing profits. The costs of maintenance and upgrading has also decreased dramatically as technology has improved since the inception of "3G" and "4G" technologies.
The "scam," if you wish to call it that, comes in deceiving the public to accept absurd pricing on these products. Most people pay for these overpriced plans due to the duopoly in the wireless industry, they offer almost the exact same product in terms of service plans as the other, with some deviation between devices. Some people accept this pricing simply because they have no choice in their area, others realize they're being "scammed" only after they find themselves in a 24 month contract.
The following is anecdotal: I had the misfortune for working for VZW during my college days, and while we were never given an exact figure for expenditure per customer, we were told the cost was less than that of one month's service (approximately $45 at the time) - essentially meaning the remaining 11 months at $45 generated approximately $495 in profit per customer , across 90 million customers... and well, there's a reason the profit margins are so huge between these two companies. |
Then use something like int32 instead of int, and you will have no issues with sizes. You can do a find and replace in your code...
You're confusing the language you're talking about with the language i'm talking about.
Longword
Integer
Cardinal
Longint
DWORD
It gets even worse when there's code with subtle logic errors, like the common mistake in assuming [that the high-bit in a pointer is never set.](
Another common bug is trying to do a binary search, and find the midpoint between two pointers:
c = (a+b)/2
Can you spot the bug?
Hint: The correct formula is c = a + (b-a)/2 . But you have to explain why the first one's wrong. Then identify it in your code before it's released. And then find any other code that might also subtly be flawed.
i know my code contains bugs related to endian order. Just yesterday i was extracting the raw bits from an IEEE754 extended (80-bit) float, by casting it to the structure (pseudocode):
ExtendedFloatCracker = structure
{
Mantissa: UInt64;
SignAndExponent: UInt16;
}
That code will fail under different endian. Another case is a lot of crypto routines that regularly endian-swap a UInt32 because the "know" that they're running on x86.
Finally, you can't just search and replace int with int32 . A lot of times i use " int " to be something the same size as a pointer.
button1.Tag = VirtualAlloc(); //Tag is int
On a 64-bit system that int needs to become int_ptr . And since the .Tag property is built into the entire class library, i would have to rearchitect the entire system.
Other times i use int when i need a 32-bit value; because i "know" int is 32-bit. For example cryptography uses 32-bit SBOX's:
s1 = sbox[n % 16]; //s1 is an int
c[n] = p[n] ^ EndianSwap(s1);
Except that suddenly the code that i didn't write, and have no understanding of, fails on ARM, because int is no longer 32-bits, and the endian swap just destroyed the number.
And that doesn't even count the problems that i haven't forseen. |
This web site explains why PETA euthanizes:](
> PETA provides no-cost, veterinarian-supervised humane medical euthanasia to any animal in their community who requires it for a current crisis of illness, injury, or emotional devastation. This service is available to animals 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, nights, weekends, and holidays. Every animal should have access to euthanasia when they are suffering, regardless of their owner's ability to pay. Because of PETA, animals in the greater Norfolk community do. |
They actually get people passionate to do something about this sort of stuff though
So imagine watching the commercials about starving children, donating money, and finding out all of your money went to making more of those starving children commercials, and none of it actually went to food?
There is a massive gulf between "Spend all your money on advertising" and "spend money on charity while advertising yourself"
If I see a commercial for starving children in Haiti, give money to the org, and they give no money to children and keep it all for "awareness" ads, what have I done to help? I'm aware that kid is starving to death because that charity exploited him to take my money! YAY AWARENESS. PETA does exactly that but apparently it's ok, because...um? |
What is your definition of working on a task, which doesn't involve interacting with said task (since the Start Menu is focused) nor observing it?
To play devils advocate on this one. Perhaps not working on it, but needing to be aware of what's going on with it. Say I'm going to start up a new program, but I've got my Instant Messenger open waiting for a message that requires immediate response, or a monitoring program that tells me if the pressure in a tank is too high, or the group may be getting ready to pull the boss or keeping my eye out for that dick rogue about to gank me in WoW. I may not need to actively monitor those, but being able to see them flash is definitely important.
Sure, it takes me about 3 seconds to load up whatever I want from the start menu (assuming it's several nested levels deep). However, I've known people that took several minutes to find things in there, and some of those people were in fact the "watching the tank pressure" people I just described above.
In 99.9% of the time if they were going to the start menu, their eyes would have no need to go to that monitoring software or IM, but on that time they did need it, it could be pretty damn important.
Having not actually used that new start menu, I don't know if functionality was gained by making it full screen. Just wanted to give an example of why "oh, they don't look anywhere else" doesn't really mean that the information outside that corner wasn't important. Our eyes jump to those changes and "alerts", so we don't have to look at them... until we do. |
This is, without question, an ethical dilemma. Why else would you take a stance that it's right or wrong if it wasn't a question of ethics? You may have already made your conclusion based on whatever reasoning you like; however, it remains a question of ethics (and law of course).
Regardless, your suggestion isn't how things work in the real world, at least not in this universe. Both law and ethics take into account the consequences and/or the intentions of an action when laying down a penalty. They don't simply judge if the action occurred and what parties were involved with said action.
If you're driving and you hit someone and kill them, the courts aren't called forth solely to determine whether or not you hit and killed the person. They're called forth to judge both the intentions and the outcome -- were you negligent, did you do everything you could to minimize the harm done, etc.? There's a reason it's uncommon to hand down a sentence to someone who hits and kills someone through no fault or negligence of their own (someone randomly walks out in the street at an illegal location, for example).
Another simple example: Your neighbor and his family are on their way home from vacation. While they were gone, they've asked you to take care of the house, get the mail, etc. You know they'll be home in about an hour and it's cold outside, so you walk over to their house and turn the furnace on so it's comfortable when they get in. In the meantime, the furnace malfunctions and their house catches on fire in that hour, causing damage.
Was your action unethical, then? Not by any rational standard. You may have to cover some damages for the simple fact that accidents happen, but the court is going to take into consideration that you weren't negligent, that you weren't attempting to cause damage, that they gave you access to their home, that you were actually attempting to be a decent person, and so on. |
I never said you must adhere to any law. Just simply, if you break a law, be willing to accept the consequences of your actions. |
They are clearly armed. One of the guys' RPGs reflects the sunlight at one point. When all this went down a few years ago I spent most of my internet time hanging out on a military forum. One of the guys who was actually on the ground ended up posting his personal pictures because people were making bullshit statements about the incident. IIRC, they found 3 AK47's and 2 RPGs when he got on scene and had the photos to prove it. I'll see if I can find them.
*Edit. The pictures have expired, but here's the official [After Action Report and Investigation]( Look towards the bottom for pictures of the weapons on the scene. |
I really think people here need to empathise with the U.S. government. I don't like them much either but let's just consider a situation you might be in:
You have a diary. It's a really secret diary where you write down how you really feel about everyone you know. What you deep down think about your "best friend," that he's actually a complete idiot but he's nice so you like him. You also have some things written down about how you went through someone's desk at work because you wanted to know why they were acting so strange lately. No one was ever going to know any of this. You're a bit ashamed of the things you got up to at times but you put it all down so you can read it later and hopefully learn from it.
You realise that you need to keep backups of this diary and that someone's going to need to scan it all to digital so you can keep it online. Sadly you don't have the time for that so you go to someone you trust and pay him to scan your diary and get him to sign contracts stating that he'll never tell anyone the content of your diary or make unauthorised copies of it. You trust him, put your faith in him being honourable and keeping your secrets secret.
Next day, you wake up and text your best friend and they just respond "Fuck off" and refuse to ever talk to you again. People look at you and think you're a monster, despite the fact they've probably done some terrible shit in their lives too, it's just that no one knows about it. "That bastard," you think, "that bastard who leaked my stuff." "I'll get him" you say, because you have those fancy contracts and you can make him pay damages for what he's done. So you haul him through court, but all the time people are calling him a hero and saying he had a responsibility to leak all your secrets. That he's a whistleblower and more people should break their promises to reveal peoples' secrets.
How would you feel at the end of this? That you got fucked over? I would. |
I think this is right on.
He is a bad guy.
Some of the stuff that was revealed due to the leaks was indeed horrifying, wrong and should not have been covered up. So in that, it's nice to see it come to light.
However, that does not make it ok to steal classified data and leak it out. When you join the military, or heck, ANY employer you may have to make some moral sacrifices. Most people have an idea of what they are before they join.
THIS IS ESPECIALLY THE CASE WITH SERVICE MEMBERS HANDLING CLASSIFIED DATA. All intel folks know they will/may see things that the government simply does not want to come out. Most of it is to protect soldiers, or civilians lives. Sometimes it may be to cover something else up. But I know that 90% of the time, the people that do wrong and have it covered up are punished in some other way, depending on what happened (military).
Hero? No, absolutely not.
He wanted some fame or revenge. Now he has it, but he will probably have to enjoy it in a federal prison for his entire life. He knew the risks and took them anyway. |
Yes. It is. Completely crazy. I was as unnerved as you by the NSA stuff although I have always been an unreasonably paranoid person. Just buy a VPN. You will be surprised how much stuff is connected to your anxiety about the NSA. Stuff you wouldn't think will start disappear and you will feel like a free citizen again. www.privateinternetaccess.com is super easy. Just pay with any suitable method. I ended up using my debit card because my bitcoins are too much of a hassle to get out of my cold-storage wallet for a 6.95 payment. After payment it takes 5 minutes to set it up from email to security. It even covers you android phone and you can use it on 5 devices at the same time.
Side note: While VPN will keep your internet usage private and anonymous there is still one weakness that has not been worked out in any usage of the internet. The traffic between the end point and the website can be sniffed. So what is being sent over a VPN can be sniffed but the from whom is obfuscated. This is a problem of encryption that has not been worked out in this day and age yet but what that means is this: The ISP can see that you are sending data through their tubes but they will no longer be able to tell WHAT you are sending. "JOHN SMITH CC NUMBER 1234123412341234" will become "DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA" to them and the NSA. It's beautiful. But if you are logging into a website on a non-HTTPS site, and assuming the NSA keeps data from encryption endpoints, they would be able to see that "Hey, someone requested a page to log into acccount X" but they will never know who logged into it and where they are from. Unless your account name is also your name. This is also beautiful. |
The NSA data center that's being built in Utah will have capacity to store a Yottabyte of data.
Sigh... I've tried to explain this several times before, but no, it will probably not have yottabyte capacity. An actual whistleblower on the project estimated that it will store five zettabytes, or 0.5% of a yottabyte. (It's still a huge amount of data though, and far more than anything we already have.) I suppose it might be upgraded in the future though.
Either way, that's still a massive amount of data. Five zettabytes is the same as five billion terabytes. Estimates for the total storage capacity in the entire world vary, but they seem to be on the order of 200 exabytes to two zettabytes. The total amount of data transmitted per year seems to be around one to four zettabytes. At that rate, one yottabyte would store all the data transmitted in the world for the next 250 years (granted, that rate will go up, so it won't last as long). |
If you're interested at all in encryption, or cyber-security, check out Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother X , available for free at (There is also a sequel called Homeland )
These books, besides being the reasons I became a computer science major and originally became interested in computers at all, very accurately discuss and portray the use of incredibly interesting technologies, often in the context of cyber security, while using an enthralling fictional plot that outlines what happens when we let ourselves live in a Big Brother society. The technology discussed is REAL and readily available, and Doctorow even tells you where to find it. Worth checking out.
Doctorow is a visionary, and the people he works with outside of his writing are nothing but pure genius. He often points readers towards Bruce Schneier, a leading expert in cyber security, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions.
All that being said, one thing that Doctorow points out somewhere in one of his many stories I have read is that, sure, we can have encryption. But the government's encryption will already be better. They'll already be able to break ours, in most cases. So... I guess it's time to go back to one-time code pads? lol |
Look at it this way; the right tool for the right job.
For example:
I work for a bank. One of the strategies of cutting costs, is to put things on the cloud. Yes, this is massively scalable (1000's of machines ready within 2 hours).
However, what you have to be concerned about, is private customer data.
I can guarantee you, it will be a cold night in hell, before a bank puts that data on a 'cloud'. |
Somehow it was x-posted to r/darknetplan and I didn't see it in r/technology. Anyway, pasting comment here.
Japan has found ways to find the original uploader of a file on PD and has made arrests for PD since 2008 (the biggest, most famous bust recently is this one: though I think they got the program name wrong - it should be PD by now (Share's been neglected for anime uploads since like 2009 or 2010)). PD is "security through obscurity" so to speak now. This does not mean that PD is inherently insecure (it has the encryption and anonymity that it claims to have) but it's not perfect.
The main problem with PD is similar to that of Tor but worse. The Japanese were able to find the uploader of a PD file by becoming a node on the network and monitoring the data through it.
(That's the picture from the bottom of the first link).
It's an interesting point the author brings up though: "Met with a real world (although ethically dubious) problem, a large, ad-hoc, block-level distributed network storage mechanism has been created with near guaranteed anonymity and user moderated cache expiry. In contrast, p2p in the western world has been aimed at convenience and the timeliness of delivery." |
The encryption protocol that was introduced wasn't meant to keep prying eyes out. It was meant to obfuscate the traffic just enough that a ISP wouldn't notice and thus prevent throttling and traffic shaping, just like venom8599 suggested. If you want full encryption or at least some form of it, use a vpn or ssh tunnel. |
You may want to double space your paragraphs
Question: What are you doing about it today?
You have to do something. We all have to. Watching on reddit doesn't fix things.
I'm setting up an encrypted netbook and I'm going to see if I can't contact any of the involved men and women. It would seem that there are choices being made, sides being chosen. I don't see why one would choose to stand with the surveillance states anymore, except fear . And it's pretty scary news, honestly. The curtain is completely pulled back now, and we see a cartel of rich folks with a massive surveillance system, huge armies, and a plan to destroy the world. And somehow, we're supposed to face off against that.
It has to be concerted, it has to be public and obvious - we must bring action against our governments, because they have lost legitimacy to rule. Who trusts any politician of a state that is so painfully subservient to the ruling elites? Who pretends at democracy? Yet we have the law on our side, the constitution, the declarations of the rights of man and the universal declaration of human rights.
They are in the wrong, and no one knows it better than they.
Why else the surveillance?
Why else the police and armies?
They are rotten through and through, and know it. They fear us, and stand constantly guarding against revolt. Look at how we're built new protest tactics. It is time for more subversion, more action, sit ins, strikes. It is time to start preparing for a real offensive against the financial f/* heads, right where they'll notice: in the pocketbook.**
Financial resistance works like this: we stop respecting the financial system, and start to tear it apart for building materials to our new world.
Take out every loan we can afford
Give the money to our friends
Have them buy tools
We all buy $20 phones
Find an abandoned house in a spot with accommodating neighbors
Fix it up with our tools and give away whatever money is left over in terms of home improvements for the neighbors.
Call this one Robbin Hood .
You can get a fresh start and leave the USA, or whatever country you're being repressed in .
Granted, this doesn't help you against the NSA wiretapping you, but stealing money the banks are happy to give you makes it easy to blow quite a hole.
When you consider that people can get mortgages, business loans, car loans, personal loans, credit cards, loans against assets (which can be bought on credit), then hell, see if you can't get a bank manager to give you one more loan just because a guy in a nice suit with a smile and a gold watch can't be a crook.
Move somewhere, get your money (hello bitcoin) somewhere outside of strict banking regulations, and start raising what hell you can .
I'm imagining networking people who do this together with encrypted communications , focusing on pressuring weak banks who are over-extended , and forming functional communities , able to support themselves with food, clothing, building materials, power generation, water supply, etc, all via laundering bank money out of the country along the same channels bankers already use.
Set up corporate shells, just like they do, and buy your land, create your shelters and bases.
Build them up into communities, within the dying rural parts and sagging old industrial cities.
Where else will we get an open chance to create real communities ?
Abandon ship from New York, LA, the Bay, London, or any big city. Go where it's cheap and local government will be far more accommodating.
The combined actions of 10 dedicated individuals could bring about a renaissance in a small town, if the money is wisely spent. It just requires people to stop respecting banks .
The banks need us. The plan is we stop buying , make it a political movement to not buy, to rob banks using their own legal services, protect and cheer whistle-blowers , and build our own communities within parts of the world that would welcome money and educated, able newcomers .
How are we to go about fundraising? With the immense immorality of the world financial system, the royal fucking nearly everyone endures, I'm surprised to see that widespread bank robbery by false loans hasn't become a political act.
It's pretty easy, and with a bit of planning, you can rob the offending nation of your education, wealth, future earnings, and civic participation.
It seems a lot more likely to succeed than armed revolt, and it doesn't have the moral edge that states use against terrorists, communists, etc. The same accusation works straight back at the banks and everyone knows it.
"You borrowed a bunch of money knowing you would never repay it."
"You bet a bunch of money you didn't have, went bankrupt, then blackmailed the world's governments for trillions, which you pumped into political bribery, legalizing your own crimes and betting on food and oil prices, driving people into starvation and war."
Who wins that moral argument? We need to make mass-bank fraud an international act of defiance. It is far past the time to declare war against the banks and their shadow governments. |
It's a bit more complicated than that. The machine does perform quantum annealing, it appears, but only for a certain subset of problems that are modeled in a specific way. There's no easy |
It is worth noting that Congressman Rush Holt has a bill in committee that seeks to repeal the PATRIOT ACT and FISA.](
[This post provides a list of representatives on the Judiciary Committee that can be contacted.]( It also provides simple instructions on all you need to say when [calling/emailing your representatives](
>When you dial the number, you'll be connected to an intern sitting in front of a clipboard or computer screen with check boxes. Wasting your breath with long-winded discussion helps no one. Keep it as clear and simple as possible, and be kind to the person you're talking to; they control whether your message goes up the chain.
>"Hi, I'm calling to ask representative X to support Rep. Holt's 'repeal the surveillance state act, HR 2818. I'm very concerned about PRISM and XKeyscore. Please pass my message along to the representative."
>If you are not asked for your zip code and you are not a constituent, don't provide it.
If you are a constituent, make sure they get your zip code.
>If you are asked for your zip code and you are not a constituent, say, "I'm calling Rep. [X] in connection with his role on the house judiciary committee, where s/he is making decisions that affect me directly, and I'd like my message passed along though I am not a constituent."
This could be our best chance of actually repealing the PATRIOT ACT, and if it doesn't pass we still keep the conversation going. Let your representatives know you aren't going to let your tax dollars be used to violate your rights.
If you can, make a remark that lets them know when the next election day is. For example, my congressional representative is planning on running for senate next year. So, I simply added "Good luck in the Senate Race next year." This gives the impression you are damn well watching their response and will vote accordingly. |
You're portraying the government as someone not being part of your life, but little did you know your friendly neighbor, who moves in next year works for the government?
He is the guy reading your mail.
Of course he will keep his mouth shut, that you're having trouble with your hot girlfriend, but maybe he invites her to talk about her problems. ;)
You're maybe maybe in a bad financial situation and talked about that to your relatives via email? He will know, but he doesn't not get any benefits from that knowledge, does he? |
IKEA isn't even Swedish (officially)...
Ingvar Kamprad = A money-grubbing asshole who kept/keeps away almost all company-earnings from the Swedish people (they don't pay their fair share of taxes to Sweden!). |
Because when internet access started becoming widespread speeds were in Baud, where 1Bd=1bit/s. As we started moving up Bauds were dropped in favour of their definition so bits per second became the norm and multiplying bits by 1000 was easy to explain to people so we started using kb/s.
Eventually we moved into megabits and gigabits. We still use bits instead of bytes because it's an already well known system and changing that would bring nothing useful to the table but it would confuse the fuck out of people. It's not done "to make the numbers seem bigger" because every three orders of magnitude we divide by 1000 and use a new name that is simple to understand. |
This is true for certain companies (such as Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba) that are traditionally heavyweights in the industry, but are losing money on their TV divisions. This is mostly because no one buys their TVs. Companies like Samsung and LG manufacture their own panels, which is the single most expensive piece. This also gives them the pick of the litter before they sell their parts to the other guys, which simultaneously makes their quality higher and prices lower.
Now, a basic $350 TV doesn't have huge margin in it. It's decent, but it's not large. That's why things like high clear motion rates (which sometimes mean nothing, and can even make things worse in extreme examples) and smart TVs are pushed so hard. It might push the cost of manufacturing up 15%, but it now they can charge you 700-2500 dollars for something that cost them a few hundred bucks to make, and with thinner TVs, not much to ship. |
Last I read, for locations with grid access, local power storage didn't make economic sense vs. selling to the grid and buying back off peak. There's also been a lot of mental masturbation over just how cheap storage has to be or if it's even feasible to get cheap enough to get it competitive (it needs to be REALLY cheap compared to today's prices).
But the only way it'll get cheap enough (if it's possible) is if there is demand for local storage. Demand brings innovation and improvement. Manufacturing for Tesla cars is the first step towards bringing those prices down. Now that Tesla's demand is making it more economical to produce the storage, I think the next step will be moving into specialty solutions like local UPS' where you need high current temp power in a smaller footprint than racks of lead acid batteries for fail over or, remote locations without any grid access. |
If any antivirus program worked. It would be installed on every computer and there wouldn't be any viruses. The typical argument to this statement is that viruses continue to exist because new ones are created everyday, but this only solidifies the fact that antivirus will never work. It will take a new type of system designed from the ground up to stop malware. Google created this exact system 2 years ago, it's called the Chrome O/S running on it's Chromebook and Chromebox products. Sometimes Chrome O/S is thought to be similar to Google's Android O/S or even a Linux O/S, but even though it's based on a Linux O/S, it's a radically different system. You can't modify a Chrome O/S system except through updates released solely by Google. This inability for the user to change anything about the system, is what stops malware from being able to enter the system. In fact, if you were able to install malware on their system, you would want to get in contact with Google as they would have a nice sized check waiting for you for discovering a flaw in their system. I'm pretty sure you would not have the response from Microsoft.
The down side to such a system is the same as its upside, the inability to install or modify the system. All is not lost though. For myself, I still utilize Windows when I have to by accessing a free [Amazon EC2]( virtual Windows computer or a free [VirtualBox]( virtual Windows computer running on Windows or Linux. I access them with a handy utility built into the Chrome O/S called [Chrome Remote Desktop]( These virtual desktops are great for doing work with programs I am unable to access from my Chrome O/S. I would never enter passwords or do any web searching on one of these virtual machines, as they aren't safe like my Chrome O/S, but the best part about using virtual machines is the ability to keep a clean image of your vm and if you do happen to get malware or mess up your vm, you simply reload from the clean copy. It's actually a very easy process to learn and requires little technical expertise. |
You don't do something like this for anything but catharsis and potential marketing. It had exactly the intended effect. I'm sure the shop owner didn't write it and think "man, surely they'll feel sorry for me and stop being petty". However, that situation does become slightly more likely in a bad PR scenario like this (which, admittedly, is the only way it could happen, the lawyers don't give a fuck). |
That's a tough call - I've been paying for parks like the Grand Canyon my entire life but if I ever wanted to go there I'd still need to pay the entrance fee - that's not exactly a warm welcome.
If the IRS mailed me a federal parks rewards card that I got points on for paying taxes then maybe I'd feel better about that situation! =]
I support state parks because they've got the benefit of being close enough that the transportation costs to get there are minimal. I can understand that asking states to shoulder the burden for larger parks might not make sense - I'd support federal funding for converting portions of those parks into national wildlife refuges (by portions I mean whatever land the states couldn't afford to fund as parks.) |
People like you make me depressed to call myself a human being. This sort of "pandering" as you call it is a life-changing experience. If I was that kid I would decide then and there I wanted to be a NASA scientist someday. Astronauts are obviously his heroes and the fact that one of them responded to him likely elevated his heroes to god status. |
There are many problems associated with running a LFTR that have yet to be solved. One of the more major is that the flouride is highly corrosive and rapidly destroys parts of the reactor. |
Many cities want competition, there are just no other company coming to them for a franchise. Also, in Colorado there is a state law against letting companies use public dark fiber. So that is one reason Google won't come here. That law really drives me nuts.
Without going in to a lot of detail, the rights-of-way are owned by the public so companies who want to use them have to get a franchise with the city. The thought being the public should get a benefit for companies using a public right of way, this is done through franchise fees which help fund roads etc.
Also cities lack the lobbing power that the cable companies have, many cities have formed groups to work together to protect and lobby.
I guess what I'm saying is don't generalize and imply all cities are responsible for the problem, also your voice at the national level is very important. But get involved and get educated as each local situation is unique. |
This is such horrible article that I do not know where to begin. First of all it uses the words fiber and 100G network interchangeably. Those are different things. Comcast, likely does not own fiber in 100G network, it leases it. It owns equipment. The client side fiber, Comcast "may" own, but this is not the 100G network. The dark and unused fiber in the ground will not magically become network either. Somebody needs to provide lots of equipment to it (terminals, amplifier nodes, ROADM nodes, whatever). Quite expensive one.
Also, the article convolutes the problem of the dark fiber with access (fiber to the home) problem where Comcast have monopoly. There is no monopoly on 100G level of network. There is monopoly on FTTH/B (Fiber To The Home or Business), and I am quite sure that there is no dark fiber in the grown that connects to your house.
One thing article mentions correctly that Comcast and other providers and such do enter into agreement with local towns that the towns would not compete with them when building fast network/access to that town. So, town has two choices (a) to agree to it and get fast broadband access and (b) not to agree with it and would not get fast access. In this case the town probably needs to increase taxes and build the network itself (or not to reduce taxes), which is not cheap. In short term the solution (a) is much better, in long term, it is probably not, at least not in present US, but it is not an obvious choice (short term vs long term) and not all towns have extra resources for network build-out.
The problem of the internet speed in US and net neutrality does exist, but I honestly do not think that those agreements are the reason for that, or even if they have any impact at all. Because those agreement do not forbid private companies to come and build alternative networks. They do not do that. Why? Because it is not profitable due to many reasons, and NOT due to agreement with the township. So those reasons has to be resolved, not these agreements. Put it in another way, if township builds this, then it likely spends probably more money from your taxes than any private company would. And if private companies think that they can not make money (i.e. people would not agree to pay much to compensate expenses) then why do you think the township will be more efficient? If anything they are usually less efficient. |
The city isn't getting applications because it's an extremely expensive, risky process. You want competition in your town? Knock down the barriers to entry for companies looking to run fibers. The city may not be to blame, but they can fix this.
Google Fiber provides a nice illustration. They picked cities that made it cheap to run fibers. Mostly on poles in KC, which is cheaper than digging up the streets, and in Austin, the city council promised expediting permits. Well, that didn't really happen. Google Fiber is behind schedule in Austin because those permits are taking forever to come through.
Obviously, you don't want 10 different ISPs having to tear up the streets to lay their fibers. But you also want to avoid one set of hardware that everyone uses, because that means no one can compete by using better hardware. (City-owned networks are bound to become second-class sooner or later, as they don't have to compete for users.)
But there's an alternative that lets 10 different ISPs all run fiber cheap, and that's to bury conduits . Empty plastic pipes, owned by the city, running to the curb in every neighborhood. Then you get to rent space to the ISPs. This is a win-win-win:
The city recoups their initial investment in infrastructure and more through competitive bidding on leasing out those pipes.
The ISP gets a shorter, cheaper rollout. They won't need the financial assets of Comcast or Google to roll out a new system.
The customers get tons of different choices and innovation as ISPs rush to the latest cutting-edge technology to provide a better service. And no one dreams of caps, throttling or fast/slow lane crap that ISPs are pulling today.
So, how do you make this happen? You're going to need to get involved in your local community. Talk to your city council, mayor, anyone that will listen. Tell them to literally get the ground work in place for the fiber ISPs to come to town.
There are laws in some states that forbid municipalities from providing free or discounted services to new ISPs, and forbid them from providing their own Internet services. Also, the article talks about non-compete agreements with the existing monopolies. But they say nothing about renting out public plumbing open to all. |
Oh Finance will definitely be consulted , it just wouldn't start with us/ be our idea to build a new plant. I've never even been in a plant, why would I care?
Operations/Supply Chain would be the ones to say 'hey we have constraints, we need a new plant.' Then we do the stuff you just mentioned and see if it makes sense from a financial perspective. |
Well, actually, it is their site; makes perfect sense for the content that is posted on it to be under their control. Under that alone, they have a strict ethical allowance. The fact that they took data in from these changes is actually defended in their policies.
I'm not saying it should have happened. Were it my decision, it wouldn't have; but it's important to understand that Facebook should not and is not responsible for the emotional well-being of other people, and that any influence that any of those subjects had from the changes were as a result of them using it in the first place. Simply, you can watch plenty of things, and see plenty of things online; because I tend to dislike posts I see from /r/atheism (that I am subscribed to) does that make it unethical for them to post things I'd deem saddening? Of course not; and that example is no more a stretch of principle than yours of banks actively lieing.
This Facebook gesture was not actively lieing; it was passive: they did not tell any one. But even then, they let it out. I'm not saying that that justifies it. I already have justified it (in both legal and strict ethical terms). So the main issue, that most people have over this, is over higher standards of morality.
Which is some thing I am inclined to agree with. Hence why, if I could have, I would have prevented this from happening. In such studies, it would've been better to have informed each person; but even so, you can have 'contaminants' that are / were depressed any how. Over such a broad scale, it's hardly like you can screen each person, or even take their details from Facebook as 100% truth (out of the over 600,000, do you really think that not one had lied about their age, gender, ethnicity or what not?). |
When I was 17, one of the subjects I was studying at the time was french. There was this schools french conference thing where a bunch of schools got together to do france related things (reading french poetry, speed dating in french, eating cheese, surrendering etc) and at the end of the day we all went into this lecture theatre where a woman from GCHQ started talking about how awesome they were and what they do intercepting comms and stuff like that. They said that if you joined them they would help you become fluent in a foreign language and then get a job in their HQ in Cheltenham, intercepting and translating foreign communications. This was years before the snowden revelations, but we all got a very weird feeling from the whole thing, as though the point of the whole "conference" had been set up for them to try and recruit young people for their agency (bearing in mind that a lot of the kids there were younger than I was, I.e. about 15) who didn't know really anything about them or what they did as I don't think anybody there had heard of them before. They told us stories about how they would make you fluent in your language of choice by sending you to countries around the globe basically making it out that they would turn you into James Bond. Really creepy stuff. |
I just hope they upgrade their data caps after this. Currently telenet customers have 100-150 GB before they get slowed down on a normal internet connection. Telenet has a lot of rules and restrictions for its 'unlimited' internet connection. For instance;
You get 160mbps down, 10 mpbs up.
When it is not peak hours, your downloads only count for a fifth. So you download 5 GB, your bill tells you you only downloaded 1GB.
When it is peak hours, there is a chance you get throttled to 5mbs, IF you are considered a power user.
To be a power use you have to download 300GB/month during peak hours, or 1500GB/month outside of those hours. (no idea whether the 1/5th rule applies here)
Peak hours are 16:00-24:00 (weekdays) and 12:00-24:00 (weekends)
All in all the rules are relatively reasonable. They are all based around load balancing their network, and you won't be charged more for downloading more than you are allowed to. They are very upfront about what service they offer and what will happen to you on their service. The fact that you can even get a plan which won't throttle you until you download 1500 GB is pretty cool. That being said, I specifically went for Scarlet internet (a subsidiary of the incumbent Belgacom mentioned in this article) despite its [slower speeds]( purely because I actually have no limit and don't have to fiddle with peak hours and calculate my usage. Last month I downloaded 800+ GB. Was this during peak hours or not? I don't give a fuck! And I get this for 35euro, which wouldn't even get me 150GB at Telenet. |
but has Google really influenced our politics or the public's interest in a bad way?
From what I read, it's the other way around. Google is willingly advocating and advancing the government's interests as a back channel negotiator. Google hired an ex-government official to lead their "Google Ideas" think-tank, and he also has his hand in various NGOs around the world.
Edit: It's a long read, but you really can't understand the gravity of the situation without reading the article. None of these |
It seems pretty simple to me: stop making invasive and annoying ads.
I try to avoid using adblock and the likes. I really do. I want to support websites. I even randomly click them on occasion to do so. But once the ads become more than I wish to handle I can't justify supporting it. It's a bad model, and shouldn't be supported. |
Responded to the other comment. |
They have become a pest. They are Mosquitos sucking at anything with a pulse and AdBlock is the OFF deep woods spray.
It seems the vast majority of people HATE ads. They hate when commercials interrupt their TV shows every 10 minutes, for five minutes at a time. They hate when their music is interrupted for a block of poorly scripted and horribly executed car dealership ads.
I understand the usefulness of advertising to alert people to products they may or may not have known they needed (or more commonly wanted ) but it comes down to this, there's nothing wrong with an informative, concise, and maybe even entertaining commercial or ad, because it IS the best way to expose people to new items/services, but when the ads are hammering you, creeping over more and more space on the page/screen/radio, repeating every break, and worst of all malevolent in design (conveniently jumping to the spot your mouse would click next, or fucking camouflaged as a button or text within a page like blue text or a fake "next page of porn" arrow that matches the design of whatever site you happen to browse) something has to give.
The Internet is a place where if you want or need something, you have access to finding the exact right one to suit your needs and budget, if the companies who waste money on shitty advertising would put that into R&D, maybe their products would reap greater reviews and sell better.
How can we allow these companies to encroach into every facet of our lives, and then sue the people who made it easier for us to get some breathing room? |
Funny story, that's actually happened in the firearms industry.
For simplicity's sake, let's say that short-barreled rifles (SBRs) are classified by the National Firearms Act (NFA) as any weapon designed to be shouldered with a barrel <16" (there's more language than that, but that's the basics) and require a 200 dollar tax stamp to acquire. It resulted in a whole lot of AR Pistol configurations [like this one]( because there's no stock - you can't put it comfortably to your shoulder([ouch]( so it's a pistol, not a rifle.
SIG built an "arm brace" called the [SB-15]( It was purportedly designed to make AR-15s easier for disabled shooters to handle and theoretically is shot [like this]( Note that this looks a whole lot like a short-barreled rifle configuration, but is not technically designed to be shouldered.
It got approved by the ATF and there are official documents saying putting this on a short AR-15 does NOT make it an SBR, and is thus not regulated by the NFA. The ATF cannot go back on its ruling.
But you can put that SB-15 up to your shoulder [like this]( pretty comfortably. |
You're right: I'm not going to unblock your small website on the adblocker, no matter how carefully you curate your ads, because the amount of time I'd have to invest to managing that outstrips the value of your website to me.
I'm also not going to stop using adblocker, because the reality is that malicious websites are a serious problem on the internet that likely have nothing to do with you (though, you probably occasionally serve them -- even major websites with dedicated ad managers occasionally have that problem).
I'm not unsympathetic to your position, but you're going to have to move on from trying to get people to see more ads until the market is better. It's just not realistic to expect people to take a security risk and invest time in your website just to see some comics, and it's a little disconcerting that artists expect me to potentially waste hours of my time every month/quarter/year because they want a couple cents/dollars in ad revenue over that timeframe from me. If you want us to take your concerns seriously, how about you take ours seriously too?
The real solution is that we're going to have to move to a more subscription/donation/freemium/merchandise based model. It's not that I object to paying for things, it's that I dislike paying for them by ruining my experience of the website and risking a malware infection for a pitifully cheap amount.
I also have a problem with the assumption you make that a pirated copy is a lost sale: I expect that rather than seeing most of those people buy the game, you'd see most of those people not even touch the game. Many pirate downloads are cases where someone is trying out a game and doesn't actually play it for very long before they've decided it's not that great and are on to the next thing. If they weren't pirating it, they wouldn't even try it.
Most piracy downloads of games serve as a game demo, and are not a lost sale as such. Rather, it's a lost sale because the product isn't great and the developer fails to convert on convincing the person it's worth money once they've used the product.
Again, the real path forward isn't whining about mythical lost sales, but rather through a shareware/freemium/subscription strategy. |
In all honesty, if ads were actually relevant to my interests, didn't push down the content of the page I am actually there for (to be fair, not the ad network's fault), and were always static, I'd be fine with them. The biggest problem is relevancy, though. Most ads just aren't relevant to my interests. I have a few specific interests and if you aren't advertising towards them, I'm not going to care.
If I could just plug in a list of interests to some website and have a cookie or whatever dropped that would tell the ad networks to only serve up adds related to said interests, I'd probably do it. After all, I do wish to support the people creating free content for me to consume, but if the ads are annoying, consistently irrelevant, or impact the enjoyment of the website, I will block them (or in the case of YouTube, skip them).
Speaking of YouTube ads, talk about lack of targeting. I don't want to sit through short cooking infomercials, hour long shows, or anything to do with babies as an advertisement. Unless it's something I'm interested in or you present it in a very interesting way, I'm going to skip anything longer than about 15 seconds. I've repeatedly sat through multi-minute ads because they were interesting, very much within my range of interests, or even because they had really good music. If I could have properly targeted ads all the time, I skip far less of them.
So I guess the |
I'm disappointed that they felt the need to lock the thread over at the ras pi forums. Edit: thread has now been unlocked. This is a real issue. In the photos and video in the forum I'm seeing two different chips. There is one chip that has a [plastic case]( that I would expect, then there is a [video with a U16 that does not have a case.](
I really do not think that ON Semiconductor would sell a part that was this light sensitive. It was not just a Xenon flash, but it was also sensitive to a laser pointer.
It's got to be one of two different things. The wrong part was used in production, or that it is a counterfeit component.
Here is [an excellent overview of the packaging technology]( being used for the chip, which is a [buck voltage regulator.]( [ |
Well for one these rules are rules, not laws. The so-called reasonably test is in the network operators favor, especially since most of these packet prioritization things are actual IETF specs that have been layed down since the 90's for a tiered model, that is only just today becoming possible. As more capacity is added to back-haul network providers, some of the capacity is higher performance...... this has the interesting effect of both providing for a so-called flat (neutral) network model, but also allowing for the new higher-capacity links to be reserved to the side for a tiered model.
So FYI most back-haul network links simply want to move traffic off their network to a transite peer as quickly as possible, the least amount of time handling packets, the better. In many cases the peering is mutual at no cost, but in the cases where it's paid..... things change.
Anyhow...all priority flags are mostly ignored, so even if google or skype, or netflix were to set the priority flags most of the time they are treated equally. The problem is google wants to set priority flags for video, or skype for voice..... and they do.... so it's a bit disingenous for them to also be arguing for NN when they are the ones who would be benefiting from prioritization. That said, the rules have changed in such a way that it's now unreasonable to simply move packets off the network as fast as possible, but prioritization flags must be honored, and they cannot be selectively handled unless it's reasonable.... what is not reasonable is natural economic gain for doing the extra work (work that was not being done before) to handle the priority flag, as I stated they were mostly not honored before.... aka neutral.
So the bottom line is companies like Google or Netflix, or Skype.... instead of paying for tiered prioritization, are simply confusing the American public about what NN actually is, and how that THEY benefite for free by it....by getting something for nothing.
The average consumer... they don't get any benifite from NN, hence the farce.... there was nevere a need for NN, and implementing NN didn't solve anything except for big corporations.
Now that is said, returning to the bits about the back-haul networks having been upgrading capacity.... there is plenty of capacity to go around on the wire-lines, so the network operators recognize they can continue to exist completely flat and honor priority flags which mostly don't exist right now. Many of the peering arrangements are mutually benificial and at no-cost. The problems come in for the paid peering/transit contracts. A recent example of this is the Netflix/Level-3 issues with a paid peer (comcast)..... Contract law comes into play here, not net-neutrality..... hence the farce.... some people would like to make contract laws all-about NN, but it's not about contractual relationships... it's about packets.
So this is where the internet is going to go, it has no choice, mutually beneficial transit peers are going to start finding one side of their peering arrangements to start costing, which means there is no incentive to on the other side exchange packets with somebody who is trying to hog the paid-peering.
Also, having said there is plenty of capacity in the wire-lines, a model where capacity can scale up, and scale-out. The same is not true of wireless networks, where the capacity is inherently finite, and it's not reasonable. Many people simply do not get this simple truth. NN rules were off the table until this day in age where capacity surplus makes it possible, but perhaps someday the same will be true of wireless, but not holding breath.
sorry for the long winded reply. |
Meanwhile in Ireland
>ACCESS TO THIS IP ADDRESS RELATING TO THE PIRATE BAY WEBSITE HAS BEEN BLOCKED
>
>WHY?
>
>On the 24 July 2009, an Order was made by the High Court requiring eircom to block or otherwise disable access by its subscribers to the website thePirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs. The Court was satisfied that on the basis of the evidence presented by the record companies that the PirateBay website is a website that facilitates the exchange of copyrighted sound recordings without the consent of the copyright owners.
>
>eircom recognises the legitimate rights of the owners of copyrighted material and believes that individuals who share or download copyrighted material without the authorisation or the permission of the copyright owner are acting illegally.
>
>The Order further provides that should the PirateBay website content be legitimatised in the future, then eircom has liberty to apply to the Court to have the Order vacated and access to the PirateBay website enabled.
>
>eircom in compliance with the Order has agreed that access to the website the PirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs from the eircom network will be blocked indefinitely from the 1st September 2009.
>
>eircom would like to reassure customers that:
>
> eircom will not monitor customer’s activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block.
> eircom will not provide personal details or any information relating to customers to any third party, including the record companies.
>
>Other operator customers:
>
>If you are a customer with another operator please contact your operator directly regarding this message.
>
>LEGAL DOWNLOADING:
>
>There is an abundance of other websites that provide content without infringing the rights of copyright holders. For a list of some of those sites please look here.
>eircom has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the four major labels and is in discussions with them to develop an innovative new music service for eircom and non-eircom customers. This new music service is expected to launch in the next few months
>
>FURTHER QUESTIONS
>
>If you have questions or concerns that you would like to discuss please contact eircom broadband support on 1890 260 260.
>
>eircom Limited. Private Company Limited by Shares. Registered in Dublin. Registration Number 98789.
>Registered Office
>1 Heuston South Quarter, St. John's Road, Dublin 8.
>© 2009 eircom. All rights reserved. |
I'm a designer for a large, well-known company and, I'm embarrassed to say, I forgot all of this stuff. When I initially saw the figure, I thought "$32k for basically a 2 page site?!?". Then when rask mentioned bandwidth and downloads, I thought "I'm sure the studio just paid for that stuff." Then you list all this stuff out, that I regularly deal with, and I realize that he didn't have any studio support and that the things that I normally take for granted still have to be accounted for...
I wonder what it would be like not to have to worry about money. :( |
this isn't complicated: He grossed ~500,000 and profited 200,000.
that's ~300,000 in expenses, 170,000 was to make video, 32,000 for website which 100,000 unaccounted misc expenses. If you want to add 170K from ticket sales, go for it, but Louie was just talking online sales. Ticket sales aren't part of this "experiment". |
EXACTLY CORRECT. Internet buzz is all thrilled about the process, since it uses all their favorite toys, and presses all their favorite "equality for the masses" button.
I also have read almost ZERO response to the actual product . I'm a fan of Louis CK even though his stuff is often spotty in actual humor and leans heavily on shock value - a big element of "humor" is simply the "surprise of the unexpected", and Louis leans on that heavily .
This latest special is standard journeyman dick jokes/sex humor. It's nothing special, and not particularly creative compared to other Louis CK work. At best, it's Comedy Central standup anthology quality, which is no doubt why Louis sold it himself, rather than trying to sell it to a media company. Which by the way, that sale is always referred to a "given" in discussion of this self-promoted program. If it was that easy, we'd be swimming in an ocean of comedian and writer media that never sees the light of day. |
From a marketing standpoint, saying it was an "experiment" definitely creates buzz in its own right, especially on a website like reddit.
If it wasn't an experiment and was just put up on the web for $5, people probably wouldn't have talked about it as much or sent it to their friends. |
To be fair, that was pretty much his only promotional expense so that's still a pretty good way of getting it advertised. |
Where's the |
Actually, historically patent trolls did sort of make their money telling people to stay off their lawns, sort of kind of not really. It's a combination of both telling people to stay off your lawn, and using your ability to keep them off your lawn to jack up the rent prices to ridiculous levels.
Where patent trolls get their reputation from is their ability to charge absolutely ludicrous amounts for patent licensing, and sue anyone into the ground who refuses to pay their licensing fees. They have a chance at doing this because (in past) the court-ordered remedy for patent infringement was an injunction preventing the infringing party from utilizing the patent. For a mobile carrier, this would mean shutting down their entire network, which is far more costly than almost any licensing fee, hence ludicrous fees. For the textbook case on this, look at [Research in Motion v. NTP]( as, at least in my opinion, the all-time great patent trolling case.
This is where the troll's reputation for waiting for a company to infringe and then suing comes from, is that it is possible to extract MUCH higher value from a patent when the infringing company is under threat of total shutdown due to court injunction. This isn't such a viable business model anymore, and doesn't really apply in this case for two reasons.
First off, the patents that Nokia has sold are likely patents that are actually worth something, so people may actually find licensing these patents worthwhile and will pay for them without going to court. In RIM v. NTP the patents were, at best, only sort of good for something maybe. They just came up with 'process' patents for radio communication with handheld devices, which may not really be patentable anymore anyway (see [Bilski v. Kappos]( and then attempted to extract massive licenses under threat of injunction for 'technology' that wasn't actually worth anything.
Second, after [eBay v. MercExchange]( patent trolls are growing increasingly unlikely of actually being able to extract injunctions from the courts if they are a company that is not commercializing the patent, or if the patent is of questionable value. All that practically means, to a patent holding company, is that they have to price their licenses at or below the value they think a court will enforce a mandatory license at, because they can't force a shutdown of the infringing parties anymore.
Note: Yes I'm aware these are all American cases, and Nokia is a European company, but this isn't some sort of American Exceptionalism coming to the fore (I'm actually Canadian), only based on the fact that, internationally, patent law tends to follow the Americans.
Added Note: Ironically, the great patent troll, NTP v. RIM, after five years in court, was settled out of court for a ridiculous amount approximately two months before eBay v. MercExchange was decided, which would have dramatically reduced the amount that RIM would have to pay off NTP. |
They do need the patent if they've been doing business with it, and not paying the licensing fee means that their business gets shut down. Then it becomes a case of pay-or-die, which is why patent trolls have a reputation for litigation. This is exactly what happened in RIM v. NTP.
>To say that licensing fees are ludicrous would mean that no company >would pay them, because the idea isn't that valuable. If a customer >actually pays those fees, he must believe the idea is sufficiently useful >that he will still make a profit by using it.
Surprisingly, this is not the case. In RIM v. NTP the patents that RIM settled out of court with NTP for actually gave RIM nothing that they didn't have already through independent development, and had they used the patents they may not have actually derived any useful technology from them. That didn't stop NTP from getting multiple billions out of RIM because, had RIM not paid, they would have been subjected to an injunction that would have shut down every Blackberry in the US and killed their entire business overnight. The pre-MercExchange/Bilski patent enforcement rules were flawed in such a way that it allowed companies that had patents that were not true inventions and had little practical value to extract massive gains from them based solely on the fact that courts would grant injunctions to protect patent rights, regardless of the patent holder and regardless of the patent. That isn't strictly the case, anymore, but necessary to understanding the history of patent trolls.
I know that, in theory, the intellectual property market should be fair and award those who develop new inventions with the fair gains from their invention, and that there should be civil trade and licensing of intellectual property, but history indicates that this is not the case and that legal process has been abused in past, repeatedly, to spin worthless patents into gold. |
Law-talking guy here. This issue was addressed previously in the case of "In re Boucher" before a federal court in Vermont. Basically, le Boucher had his laptop searched at the Canadian border and they found some illegal porn. They arrested him, but later discovered that his hard-drive was encrypted (it had been accessible when he was arrested).
The Judge in that case ruled that he had to turn over an unencrypted copy of the hard-drive, and that he was not protected by the 5th amendment.
In law-talk, there is "testimonial" and "non-testimonal" evidence. The 5th amendment protects the former (forcing you to talk and incriminate yourself on the stand), but doesn't protect the latter (stuff like forcing you to give fingerprints or a DNA sample). The court found that forcing the defendant to give a copy of a encrypted drive fell in the latter category. |
This is a good idea but, am I the only one who thinks that we should still fight for our "old" internet?We are now creating legal ways of sharing files but these methods are technically stupid. Why should one delete his file if he can just make a copy and send it to his friend? I mean, we, the human race, created a way of sharing stuff together easily and quickly and most of all this method of sharing does not deprive the lender of it`s content. but we are getting told what to do by a minority. We should first prevent/stop "SOPA" like laws from emerging, if this fails then your method is gold.
this will probably never be read... sry for grammar mistakes. |
I think this is a brilliant idea and wish you best of luck in fine tuning it and creating something awesome.
I do not understand the people who seem to be attacking you on issues as you seem very willing to listen to outside input and change or amend the way things are currently. Keep listening to clients even if they are being rude in their approach to get what they want, you will find out what they actually need to be happy along the way even if it is frustrating an it will help the project.
If it was practical to do this in my country I'd already be signed up. At the moment though its just cheaper to make phonecalls and copy to an external and drive to a friend. |
I own the primary DNS servers and edge transport servers of our Org: they're my responsibility.
External DNS is recorded only for domain authentication per session and that's it.
Does it work?
Yes: clear the check box.
No: Start logging and kill them when your finished.
Intermediary's won't be your problem since you cant control their content..(bar router logging which is a horse shit fantasy)
Your gear is whether you own it or rent it.
If you don't know how it logs you shouldn't be running it in the first place cos you obviously don't know how it works.
If you rent your services you are responsible for connecting the dots and if you own the services you are responsible for the dots being there in the first place.
Auth Proxies work from the proxy address and use TCP session ID to maintain, not IP cos its irrelevant to the network.
Your service description to me reads like:
(Yourself): Not my problem; Not my problem; Dunno what this is; Not my problem; Not my problem, someone else's fault etc..
The thing is that if you want users to trust you, it is your bloody problem so sort it out and quit making excuses.
I can tell you, on my domains whatever the fuck I record is my choice the only thing I'll permit is DNS referrals and auth sessions which will be purged after 24 hours.
No one gets the contents of my servers without my users permission and our explicit co-operation. Its not up to some external logger requesting shit. (judiciary witnesses are a different case) |
Author here. Re: sideways orientation, and the air gap, see our interview with the inventor: |
Police work barely breaks the top ten in most dangerous jobs.
I've worked in several fields more dangerous.
When they decide upon their career they choose to take those risks. If they want to play military, they can instead go join the fucking military. They are police officers, not fucking Special Forces. These SWAT teams were meant to be used in actually dangerous situations like that shootout in LA. Or hostage situations.
When you ACTUALLY FUCKING KNOW you need that level of force.
To do otherwise results in dead people, dead animals, and a country that no longer trusts its police. Just because you can go fly hunting with a sledgehammer doesn't mean you should. And if you do, don't be surprised when you destroy your fucking house and your wife divorces you. |
Unless George Lucas is directing, that is the side I would rather be on. Shameful, I know, but romanticizing "goodness" leads to poverty, depression, and unemployment. |
That sir is a stereotype. Not all people "from the west" eat bacon every day, drive a v8 pickup, have a cabinet full of chemical cleansers and beauty products and plastics and fragrances and shop at walmart...
Don't be such an ignoramus!
*Edit: It's harsh words like this that actually turn the ignorant American's off to discovering how rewarding life can be if they choose to go down this path and explore the green lifestyle. I implore you to take a lighter approach to people and encourage change instead of griping and throwing everyone into a "pile" of "western shit." It just hurts the cause, dude.
I could EASILY take you out and find some random people and illustrate my point perfectly. Try going out to a regular health foods restaurant here in town and start asking questions about Veganism and green products. You're very likely going to encounter staunch resistance to the ideas because they are USED TO BEING OVERLY CRITICIZED for something they don't even know anything about!!! |
One big problem I have with Imazon is the main driver of deforestation is agriculture, NOT logging. [Science Daily Source](
So why do companies need to invest in software like Imazon when it actually does not impact the real driver of deforestation? It's a flawed PR strategy that doesn't even help the bottom line of Home Depot.
Edit: I re-watched the video and didn't even see a mention of Home Depot. After reviewing the product and the real ways they're using it, I'd be tempted to report the title as inaccurate. I don't see any evidence on the link or the net that actually shows the impact to lumber retailers.
Although Home Depot's [Wood Sources Page]( may be sanitized, it still shows only 2% of lumber sources coming from South America. If I remember correctly, most lumber that comes from the Amazon isn't of construction quality when compared to North American species. I believe most of it gets used for smaller utility products like chopsticks or utensils. China and other Asian countries are the largest purchasers of this junk wood.
All in all, the software itself does seem useful. It's mapping technologies like this that are useful for surveillance and detection. I think the CDC and Health Canada use similar methods when monitoring disease outbreaks. |
The use of "they" and "The Government" as principle nouns is always my indicator that someone is uninformed. Lets actually analyze the situation and see if governments actually hate freedom. Democratic governments are made of people, rules, and arbitration. So you either believe that the people we elect hate freedom or that the system intrinsically disfavors freedom-promoting laws, or both.
It is hard for me to believe that popularly elected people hate freedom because at some point and for a solid duration they were the same as us, non-elected plebeians. You could try to argue that the experience of being a politician makes someone hate freedom, but that is pure conjecture assuming neither of us has experience being politicians and we have no other insight.
Systems can be powerful things and can certainly affect people's decision making. Is this the case with Western Democracy? At least in the USA, I would expect not (not being directly involved, I couldn't say for sure). The foundation of the government is the constitution, the bill of rights, and, in concept, the declaration of independence. These all explicitly promote freedoms that don't infringe upon the freedom of others. The legislative process is made to promote the will of the majority while protecting the minority.
There is something that hates freedom though. Any kind of progress is difficult if people don't support it well. Any easy way to achieve progress is to force people to support it. This "internet legislation" is just that, a lazy way to make progress towards a secure internet. If anything, I would say that lazy, amoral decision makers hate freedom. You could say that many of our congressmen are such lazy decisionmakers, and you would be much closer to the truth than if you blamed "they" and "The Government". |
This will be buried because this thread is already 5 hours old but for what its worth I'll sling it anyway.
Let's say person A is an American citizen who interacts with others on the world wider web. While his individual activity can be monitored fairly easily because, like many Americans, he does not practice good cyber security, it is considerably more difficult to monitor the activity of his entire neighborhood. Expand this to the entire nation and you begin to see an emergent problem. While theoretically this Agency could be monitoring you it likely wouldn't have the resources to monitor everyone and would need to be selective. The best way to find people worth monitoring is to see who probes government cyber assets from outside and monitor them. Problem if they are a U.S. citizen the agency hits a wall and can't do it without a warrant. Contrary to popular belief the government does care about your individual right because the government is a collection of individuals working for what they believe to be liberty regardless of what is said.
On to the nature of state secrets as it pertains to cyber communications monitoring. Let's say that I am a network administrator and I have information on systems within my network I want to protect from hackers. In order to defeat successful hackers its helpful to know how they did it. So if the person who was exploiting my network was the NSA and I knew that then a legal proceeding detailed how they do it. I would immediately be able to secure my network from their future attacks. So let's say I am actually an administrator of a Chinese government network. Now it seems like less of a good idea to expose how the U.S. may be infiltrating the network because then the Chinese would be able to secure against us/prove it is us with cyber forensics. |
The idiocy of some of the top responses is shameful. It's why I'm not always proud to be an American.
Ignorance, shortsightedness, inability to see the "big picture", and a very over-inflated sense of entitlement and self-worth is why "privacy" is an issue.
Why should it matter if anyone's listening to my conversations / tracking my internet exposure? Unless I'm doing something wrong, that is.
"But what about the innocent people that this could be used against?" "What about corruption amongst those who are 'listening'?" "What if I want to naked sexy-time Skype my wife?"
Calm down, snowflakes. You're not that special. They simply don't care about you.
The pros outweigh the cons. Some are legit concerns, but don't weigh in as a drop amongst a bucket of potential good that can come out of something like this. Don't kill a potentially beneficial program because you want the freedom to do potentially bad things without repercussions.
And for the overseas people touting their established privacy regulations - You're part of the problem. Legitimate intercontinental cyber law enforcement has been made so cumbersome by your regulations, that even potentially very serious crimes aren't worth pursuing. ( )
I'll likely be labeled as "Anti Privacy" - but in that, you'd be missing the point. It has less to do with privacy, and more to do with "greater good."
That is an age-old debate, and I won't win in a forum post. Neither will you. I expect to be downvoted to oblivion, as well as a receive a crapton of pseudo-intellectual one-sided counterarguments. Fire away; they'll fall on deaf ears, as I'm not here to debate; Just to get some of you thinking. |
I just signed and did my part. Signature #8... Come on b/r/osky's sign this thing!!! If we got 100k signatures to petition Obama to build a Death Star, then we can surely get this done! Registration only asks for email, name, &amp; zip. Takes you an extra 30 seconds. You might not get TITS in return for signing it. But if you do, you might be on GW in the next year or two looking at as many as you can at 1GBps. Now come on and sign this shit!
( |
I'm the type of person who doesn't do anything if it's not free (other than eat and school). I don't have a habbit of going to movies, amusement parks, expensive restaurants, or pretty much anything else except for rare occasions.
Am I broke? Hell no, I'm a Ph.D. student on a fellowship making almost 2k a month not including stipends.
What's the purpose of this post? What if I told you there existed a large number of people who would simply move onto something else that's free if they cannot pirate? Along with myself, we will simply find other free alternatives.
Will more people start buying things? Sure, however, popularity will suffer. You see, if I do not watch, lets say movie XYZ. I will never talk about movie XYZ. My friends (who don't pirate) may never hear about XYZ. My friends don't like to mindlessly waste money, so movies that are not mainstream will probably never surge in popularity because they don't want to spend $15+ for a movie they never heard of. |
A subscription model at $7/mo. That's cheaper than many movies and TV shows sell for per-episode or two. Hell, it's cheaper than a theater ticket, and you only need one for an entire family. It's a pretty generous model, really. You can already get TV shows on iTunes/Play for like $3-$5 a pop which is fairly reasonable.
The study you linked does make some points about the motivations of pirates, but there is a huge sampling bias problem here. It draws from people who are already in the YouGov survey database (which will likely exclude MANY younger people who pirate, especially kids, and will not include ANY pirates who don't really have much of a web presence aside from occasional downloads) and then asks questions where people will not necessarily give you the truest answer, just the one that they think paints them in the most positive light (also known as response bias . Further, people who care about and are well versed in the issue are many times more likely to respond to such a survey request, which further distorts the responses received away from the true population (this is called voluntary response bias). |
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