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The majority of the classified information they've dump has been the sort of shit that the federal government produces in reams and forgets about. It's not "whistle-blower grade" materials like the Pentagon Papers. All it's likely to do is make the politicians more paranoid and to impose security theater on federal agencies. There's already enough of that within the federal government itself. The last thing we need is more.

What Wikileaks needs to do is focus on stuff like exposing Bank of America which it says it plans to do. What the big banks have done to this country and world is actually worse than what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their behavior has quite literally crippled the ability of the housing market in the US to function, ever, without radical political intervention to clean up the title disputes, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. It's more likely than not that their manipulations have us on the precipice of a depression that is far worse than the Great Depression. Sure, we found out that an extra 15k Iraqis died than we were officially told; the big banks have laid the foundation for an economic environment in which a lot of people in our own country may very well starve to death before it's all said and done.

If Assange's goal really is to clean house, then there are many targets that are softer, more inviting and more damning when exposed than most of what Wikileaks has accomplished with the DoD. If I had his ear, I'd tell him to go after Goldman Sachs. Go for the mother load of information from them. Get someone to hand over all of the server logs of communications between them and federal officials. Or better yet...

Target the Federal Reserve.

One of my fears here is that Firefox will be hit as hard by IE 9 as Netscape was with IE 4. Mozilla seems largely oblivious to how ambitious IE 9 is. A hardware-accelerated, multi-process, significantly more standards-compliant browser that supports H.264 out of the box would be just the thing for Microsoft to potentially stop Mozilla dead in its tracks on Firefox adoption.

As I have pointed out, IT is as wasteful, if not more so, than the health care system. It is also filled with far more errors, failures, etc. than would ever be tolerated from the health care system. Even if you believe this is comparing apples to oranges, they're still fruit; both are extremely complicated, technically-challenging fields which have added a significant benefit to the lives of most modern people and the efficiency of our economic system. Medical professionals are as educated, if not more so, on average, than most IT workers and software developers. They are also significantly more regulated than most of us who have to work for on business infrastructure so we don't get to use the excuse of obstacles with them.

Yet, no one on Slashdot and other left-leaning sites wants to see a similar smashing of major enterprise IT firms like Oracle simply on the basis that their products are bloated, inefficient are so overly complicated that their "ecosystem" of support professionals is damn near a make-work program considering the delta between what most customers actually need, and what the computer industry rams down their throats. I don't want to see more regulation, I want to see less, but at this point I freely say to a lot of the geeks I meet who make big bucks on software that is as bloated, inefficient and overpriced as they say the health care industry is "yuck it up chuckles, they may come for your ass next."

As I said on my blog****, the irony was that within 1 year of his article JavaScript was released in Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Brin and Page began Google. The former played a key role in enabling a lot of the usefulness in the web and the latter played a key role in organizing it effectively from the viewpoint of the public, especially to the extent that his point about how hard it was to find useful data was negated by Google.

I have to agree with Newsweek's writer who criticized him by saying that his problem wasn't in stating what the problems were, but his blithe assumption that they would never be overcome. That, right there, was the fatal flaw as it assumed that the computer industry was not invested in the Internet's future. That's almost like assuming that the established auto companies have no interest in the electric car market and would gladly let Tesla take it over unmolested.

****Just an ironic dig since he figured that blogging would never become mainstream, let alone that some bloggers (myself excluded) would become powerful players in the media.

This coming from the same mainstream media that usually just regurgitates whatever the police and prosecutors allege in a criminal report? Case in point, what happened to Ryan Frederick. Absolutely questionable and "juicy" from the beginning. At the very least, the papers should have made a scandal about why the police would be so moronic as to raid a small-time pot user 3 nights after a man with a vendetta against him burgled his home. If that isn't a public interest scandal right up there with "sex offenders are in your neighborhood," then I don't know what is because when the news poured out about what really went down, it made a lot of his community deeply uncomfortable about what the police would do to "protect them" (BTW, it gets worse, like the police using men who are active burglars to get them evidence).

Excuse me, but if Google or someone can create an active intelligent search agent which will build me a comprehensive list of public corruption news, political news, civil liberties issues, etc., then I'll be a hell of a lot more informed and less "ignorant" than I would be if I had to read a paper or magazine that caters more toward the assumption that the only thing people want to read about is celebrity news and what pretty white girl got killed after hooking up with 3 strange men in a foreign country.

I don't like it as much as the next guy, but there are limits on the use of National Security Letters and the FBI doesn't pay attention to them. The Inspector General has cried foul on numerous occasions about this, but Congress is too busy debating "more important things" like redistributions of wealth of to the health insurance industry to care.

Make it painfully clear to IE6 users what they're doing.

My version, which is more educational for them.

Why isn't the news story here that McDonalds has a program in place to spy on customer's wifi usage, to get customers arrested? If my phone company were eaves dropping on my conversations to report to the police, I would have a problem with that. If my ISP were eaves dropping on my internet phone calls or other communications to report to the police, I would have a problem with that.

Well, for one, they have a large number of people hopping on and off their network, and they don't maintain a constant business relationship with them which would help them identify rogue or criminal users. And on top of that, a little self-regulation to catch criminals will help them ward off legislation like this which is a Stasi-like surveillance boot-up-the-ass that has support in both parties.

And here's a question for you. Who the hell do you think you are using someone else's network for free and then complaining that they check up on your behavior from time-to-time? This isn't your ISP. This is a private business which is giving you free access to their wireless for your personal enjoyment.

One of the dumbest things that you can do as a government employee is to try to run a business on the side that has dealings with your agency or other agencies affiliated with yours. Some people at TSA got in trouble for trying to double dip.

I have written a number of articles explaining why data retention policies are terrible in words that the average user can understand. The biggest one, IMO, for the average person, is the amount of personal information that their ISP would have to keep on them, and how that would make their ISP an identity theft goldmine for criminals.

The federal government could help the states by setting up an official repository of rates and an official reporting system standard for all 50 states. Just get the states to report their rates to the IRS, and have the IRS mandate a single, unified standard method of reporting sales taxes to all state governments on an "either you implement this, or you don't collect it" basis.

Many Americans find the concept of monopolies offensive. Unlike Europeans, we don't tend to view capital as uniquely exploitative. If anything, many of us realize that a lot of workers will exploit their employers to demand pay and benefits well beyond what their productivity is worth. That's a critical part of the reason why the Big 3 are failing now. Say whatever you will about their cars not selling, part of the reason is that because of the amount of money the Big 3 have to spend on benefits for retirees AND current workers, American cars cost, on average, at least $1,000 more than the average Japanese car (most of which are now made in America when sold in America!)

We also tend to find it offensive when we are forced to join organizations against our will or interests. Why should a worker have to join a union to work at a particular company? There is no morally acceptable reason why this is so.

I predict that it'll be a useful tool for stopping severe cyber bullying. While I do find the ramifications troubling in some respects, the ruling here seems to be specifically on the grounds that her goal for violating the ToS was to commit a crime. The big problem with this ruling is that there are a lot of crimes that can be committed when we don't mean them to be, such as copyright infringement (fair use ain't always obvious).

This case probably has a 50/50 chance of being overturned in appeals, so I wouldn't worry about it since this is a stretch of the Computer Fraud Act and appeals courts tend to be more conservative in their tolerance of twisted prosecutorial language.

Unless the FBI is simply foaming at the mouth to create FUD and bungle this like they bungle everything else. It's more of a matter of industrial espionage rather than national security.

If the Chinese got ahold of that new laser weapon system from Northrop Grumman, I doubt you would make such a neat little dichotomy there between industrial espionage and national security.

The Chinese government is actually quite hostile to the United States and many other countries. Just look at what they're doing to Africa if you have any doubts as to whether or not this is a country you want having technology that can be used to assist them in becoming a credible player in space on a military footing.

This Physicist should probably be executed or imprisoned for life if there is any way to get such a sentence. In a more honest time, what he did would be considered treason in spirit, if not exactly the letter of the law.

One of the things that keeps us safe, and keeps us from fighting long, protracted wars is the fact that other countries have a damned hard time competing with us technologically on the battlefield. The Chinese have, for a long time, been trying to steal said technology from us. They really ramped it up after the first Persian Gulf War when their soldiers actually got to see what our technology could do when we unleashed a largescale attack on another country with our new weapon systems. One of the most effective ways for us to prevent a war is to make betraying military applicable technologies to their government an offense that most of these guys would never commit because the punishment is so severe.

I'm predicting that Google's flu tracker is going to end up being used as an argument in favor of a federal data retention mandate if it turns out to be successful for the CDC. While DHS may have recently shown that datamining doesn't work on terrorists, I'll bet that it would certainly work on certain classes of other criminals like sex offenders. How long before the DoJ starts down this path by saying, "hey Google, why don't you keep an eye on suspicious searches for us, and let us know if someone reaches a threshold of $X searches/month so we can see if they're bad dudes banging little kids." The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Think I'm paranoid? Then explain why the USA PATRIOT Act was ready to go so soon after 9-11. It's not like they were just waiting for a justification to present it to Congress...

I had an incident happen with my coffee at a Starbucks in a Target that was almost as bad as the sundae story.

Here's my prediction, on record: this policy will be a real boon for micro laptop companies like Asus. Who is going to want to travel with an expensive laptop that can get snatched up by an avaristic or paranoid border cop? It bothers me to no end that they don't need due processes for this because I have a new MacBook Pro. The thing is worth $2,000 and is precisely the sort of thing that would become a target of something like this where the cops turned seized cars into a private car rental service for their own pleasure.

So I guess what'll happen is that people will take an Eee PC with them, and then download the data as needed from some offsite backup service. That, and the whole problem of people avoiding business travel to the United States.

Just because the state says it's legal, doesn't make it moral. This, and asset forfeiture laws, are nothing more than a tyrannical attempt to legalize armed robbery committed by government employees. A federal agent who seizes a laptop without sufficient probable cause is no less of a criminal in a moral sense than a thug who steals it from a coffeeshop while you work or from your house. Furthermore, I'm not a betting man, but I'd bet good money that this will happen to many of the laptops stolen. Everyone who has paid attention to the state of federal law enforcement knows that increasingly, the feds just don't give a damn what the law says, like how the FBI has a serious culture of just breaking the law WRT national security letters, even after the AG has filed reports to Congress that should have shamed them into compliance.

Gotta love that ad for Giganews that is being put up on that article by Google AdSense.

The first time someone launches a mass shutdown order in a metropolitan area during rush hour, will be all it takes to turn the public wildly against this.

Is that it gives the government even less excuse to use no-knock raids for crimes that could easily be handled by regular police work. Take the case of Ryan Frederick, for example. The police created a situation where they ended up losing an officer after they attacked the house of a suspected drug dealer (who shows all signs so far of being completely innocent). Had the police gotten his cell phone information and mapped his daily routine, they could have discretely caught him by surprise in a public place, taken him in for questioning, and the only one going to jail would have been the police informant who lied his ass off and victimized both sides. This cell phone tracking actually gives civil libertarians an argument as to why these raids cannot possibly be justified in most cases because the police can figure out where the person is going, and ambush them when they have the advantage (something they don't have when assaulting a home).

Who sees that this could become a huge regulatory nightmare in the coming years for software developers? This will only be effective so long as either the public continues using mainstream protocols for most activities, and the protocols that the FBI wants to monitor don't get changed or replaced on a regular basis by those who don't want to be monitored. The eventual outcome, IMO, besides the obvious privacy, constitutional and financial issues involved in this would be a bridge between this mandate, the data retention mandate and CALEA causing all providers of IT products to comply to make their products easy for law enforcement to monitory, going so far as to outlaw the deployment of software that is capable of evading surveillance.

I gleefully welcome the destruction of the mainstream media. Why? Despite touting itself as a watchdog, the media is quite possibly the single biggest enemy that "democracy" and liberty have in the United States. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that whatever can be said of Bush and Cheney, the mainstream media beats them by a wide margin. It doesn't criticize the government except a few politicians, it almost never holds corrupt and abusive government employees accountable, and it rarely provides a voice for actually holding the government by the short hairs and making it fess up.

There is a case that, for me, was the last straw. It was written in the Pilot, which is a major Virginia media outlet. I have a write up here showing how much of a f$%^ing lapdog the media was in not questioning how the police carried out this raid. The reports have only gotten worse, including it appears to be that the police conducted this raid after knowing that their own informant committed a felony against the poor guy by breaking into his home 3 days before the raid (might explain why he was trigger happy when the police raided the house 3 days later at night while he was in bed).

The media has two modes when it comes to their traditional role of watchdog: lapdog and psychotic attack dog that turns on the children. They'll either damn near cover stuff up, or make a mountain out of a molehill, when there are plenty of good examples that would get the public furious for good reasons.

What is this? Some bullshit concept of "journalist ethics and social responsibility" at work? I don't buy the corporate angle that much because if they reported half of the shit that makes it to civil libertarian blogs and kept up with it, they'd have more naturally occurring controversy to sell ads with than the law should allow.

So, I say bring it on to the mainstream media. There are plenty of lightweight media outlets that aren't barely more than Associated Press resellers, and they're going up against Craigslist, a 800lb gorilla in the classifieds market now.

I have a lot of sympathy for people who just want to do research, but the free market is not supposed to provide a safety net that ensures that people only get to do what they want to do. That's why I like the new patent bill. It's a step forward, even if it's not perfect, because it puts more safeguards into place and allows judges to use more objective standards to award damages. So what if Amazon ends up getting badly hurt by losing this patent? They're a retailer. Their role in the market is to sell, not to research. If they suck at their core business now, well, that's their problem now isn't it?

Prosecutors generally have a lot more freedom to act independently than cops do, especially cops on the street. Prosecutors can, at their discression, dismiss charges where they think that justice won't be served or there is a good reason to let the defendant go (ex. the cops arrested a guy purely on technicality). Some of the examples of prosecutor misconduct can be quite tragic, and show far less ethics than their police counterparts (which can be very bad in their own right!)

One would think it would be about economies of scale, stupid AT&T, et al. Seriously, if you offer a base broadband package for $10/month with 2GB of download bandwidth included, and $0.25/GB after that, I bet that would reliably generate a lot more revenue, in a more efficient way, than mucking around with websites, contracts, etc. Anyone remember the telecoms trying to make companies like Google out to be robber barons, foisting all of the costs onto the public? That's how ridiculous it's gotten. Unlimited bandwidth may be sensible someday, but not right now. The rest of the network just isn't up to handling many users maxing out their pipe every month. Metered bandwidth would solve that in a market-friendly way.

Look, I know that we don't have to use these services, but that doesn't make this sort of policy any less dangerous to the public in general. The Bush Administration will not be the last time we will hear about data retention policies, and if these services keep maintaining such detailed records, it's only a matter of time before the government gets full access to them. The privacy implications for that are that it'll be the first major step toward a total surveillance state for modern communications. A first, very, very important step once they get the search engines and ISPs working together to help them keep detailed record on what is done online.

Let's start casting lots for when the next media hysteria about Nintendo DS-wielding pedophiles will commence. I give it two weeks if the game sells well.

Six months ago, I said this was bound to happen to Google. Youtube's business model is simply too much like an ad-supported file sharing network. They don't do enough to censor and punish copyright infringers, and now a studio with the resources to sue Google is taking them on in court.

I have always said that extreme examples provide some of the clearest examples, so here's one for you. Let's say that President Bush got away with raping and murdering a teenage girl in the oval office. Then President Hillary Clinton in 2008 did the same thing with a teenage male staffer. Should we not still try to prosecute President Clinton out of the principle that "a crime, is a crime, and all violent crime should be prosecuted?" By your standards, no we shouldn't. In fact by your standards all crime should go unprosecuted, all victims left to suffer, all because some jackass on the top of the totem pole got away with shenanigans. Dear God, do you realize what you are advocating by saying that you would automatically vote to acquit? You would allow a serial child molester go to make a statement against Bush. That is, pardon my French, fucking sick.

Is that none of the big political blogs care one bit about this. Sure, they'll write volumes about things like the NSA wiretapping program, but it's so far been largely up to smaller blogs to track this issue. I've been following it now since the first serious proposal about a year ago. What gives? Why is it so hard to get non-geeks to care about an issue that amounts to one of the biggest police state advances in the last twenty years?

The only problem with this issue is that it will cost them a lot of money to support all of the services affected by it. It won't be like the telecoms with just a few companies affected. Potentially tens of thousands of businesses will have to be compensated if they want similar compliance.

It's easy to find people who have unsecured wireless. Those cheap routers don't keep detailed log information about who is connecting to them. It's a law enforcement nightmare and I'm surprised that the FBI hasn't gotten very gungho about punishing people for not securing wireless connections. We're reaching a point where it can be all but impossible to determine whether or not the person is guilty of a crime until the humiliating arrest and prosecution. In some cases it's trojans, others it could be open wireless. Law enforcement still hasn't grasped the delicacy of the situation. You can tell from their tactics. If they did, they'd understand how easy it is today for computers to be hijacked such that there is no way to plausibly determine prima facie who really is doing it, even if they have the IP address it seems to be coming from.

By now I think the Attorney General's comments on Habeus Corpus have been widely read, and remember, this guy was a member of the Texas Supreme Court. Here is another example of the lawyers and judges basically saying that the basic meaning of a phrase does not mean anything. The real problem in these cases and so many like them is that we have allowed our legal profession to become filled with addle-brained sophists who can make the word "is" mean "very well might be in theory" instead of what everyone knows it means.

The more I have looked at the DMCA, the less evil it strikes me. The real evil is how it is applied, which is why it needs to be revisited. It probably just needs clarification.

Some of his past foibles for those that may not have followed his illustrious career as the Prime Minister who has turned Britain into a nanny state with a big, middle class-friendly smile. Well, I should be careful by qualifying that by saying it depends on how you look at it. Europeans may be wont to think that America is full of gun violence, that it's all like the Old West, but I go "HOLY SHIT!" when I read some of the stories that come out of Britain under Blair with yobs and how the police deal with them. I've lived my entire life in the South, in small towns and even the worst I have seen of police here pales in comparison to how much the British police seem to side with criminals against law-abiding citizens. I gotta be honest, I'd feel safer walking through any working class town in the South than the equivalent in Britain. Between violent criminals and politically correct, criminal-loving, politicized police, Tony Blair has done a lot from what I've seen in the media to totally fuck up Britain.

It will cause a legal battle similar to the one over whether porn in the browser cache counts as possession. I predict that within a few years of this becoming law, some prosecutor will argue that you are responsible for the content that is moderated down by your spam filters. For those that don't know, in WordPress, Movable Type and probably others, spam is not by default automatically deleted. It's stored in the database with a flag on it that keeps it from being published when a page is sent. Why do I make this assumption? Because prosecutors are probably the ultimate assholes in law enforcement, who make a career often out of using every nook and cranny of a law to exact the maximum punishment they can get to advance their career.

As I said a while ago, with hardware that low-powered, it becomes mostly a replacement for pen and paper, not something to use as a foundation for really teaching much cool stuff. The fact that it is also going to end up being an extremely expensive program doesn't surprise me either. $970 per kid is a lot for this thing no matter how you look at it. From an American POV, we'd call that a wasteful social program. To a third world country or one that is very much struggling to really become a first world country, it's a very, very expensive program to not do a pilot program.

You want to help the poor do cool things abroad? Follow Muhammad Yunus' example. His micro-credit system will probably do 20x more in the long run to raise the quality of life in the countries that follow his model than the OLPC could ever even dream of being part of.

If you have 50 cases where a law can be circumvented, it has no practical force anymore. That's what has happened to virtually every area that restrains law enforcement and the intelligence agencies in the past several decades. What we have now are just general behavior guidelines, not anything that could be construed as law and order. The irony, as I have said before, is that we continue to play Russian Roulette by allowing immigration in a "time of war" from the very countries whose people largely hate us. Despite the Neocons' penchant for WWII analogies, they can't seem to grasp the fact that we didn't allow immigration from Italy, Germany or Japan during the hostilities.

The short answer is that if you want to be reasonably safe from terrorism, deport all Saudi and Egyptian nationals from the United States and bar them from getting visas. If you think this is extremist, just imagine what would happen to these people if they got caught by a mob after a terrorist sets of a nuclear bomb. We can't know what's in their heart for America, but we do know one thing: these countries have a disturbing tendency to create people who are violently opposed to the core values of America and we don't owe them shit in terms of immigration privileges if they want to come here and change those values.

They pulled that crap with a Usnet provider, but our legal system actually provided the provider with some recourse against the police that moderated their seizure of equipment. The root problem in these sorts of cases is that the police can't seem to get competent forensic techs for this sort of thing. I don't know how it is in Germany, but in the US it's not for lack of money in many jurisdictions. I'd blame it in general on the police culture.

I've noticed a lot of the nay sayers don't seem to have really used Vista on decent hardware. My 1 year old laptop works just fine with RC1, and in fact the GUI is significantly slicker and more responsive than any XP installation I've used. I like Vista and think it's going in a kick ass direction. Vista is not appropriate for older PCs that are underpowered, but neither was XP when it came out.

If you buy a crappy PC, it's going to become outdated sooner rather than later. It's just that simple. As a general rule, I don't pay anything less than $1200-$1300 for a new PC. My laptop was going for $2000 a year ago before I got a $750 off deal. You can't buy a cheap POS for $500 and expect it to work like a $1500-$2000 (or especially $3000+) PC. How many of these mental giants would expect ferrari performance from a stock Civic?

It's good enough for him, but not his own people. This guy is a menace. He's neither stupid nor insane and is in fact the closest thing the region has ever seen to a leader who could fill in the shoes of a Middle Eastern Hitler. Read some of Mike Wallace's comments about him after an interview with him, if you think he is such a joke.

Wiretapping, when restrained by something like the 4th amendment (which Tony Blair would kill even faster than Dubya if Britain had it), is a good thing. There need to be checks and balances that allow the police to spy on people who a reasonable person with the evidence would conclude is a dangerous criminal. Society cannot function with dangerous criminals having a decisive upper-hand. Fortunately, in America, our founders gave us a realistic balance. I cannot speak for Britain, but I would assume thatit used to be pretty good considering the country's liberal history.

As I have said, the problem is with Islam itself. Enough political correctness, please. Islam is a religion that exhorts its followers to violence. If you don't believe me, read these verses. Some of them are so clearly pro-violence against unbelievers that they don't need a "context" to be "properly understood." Now, with the exception of radical Hinduism and unorthodox strains of pseudo-Christian religions, almost all modern religion outside of Islam considers peace to be a virtue.

And just as a warning to those who want to cite a few violent verses in the Bible to me as "proof" that Judaism and Christianity are as bad as Islam, I can cite just as many direct commands from God that override any "general" interpretation of those.