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And for the record I'd advise local law enforcement to put up signs telling kids they should not feel welcome on your lawn. Ugh, Lena Dunham anyone? 500 yards or more champ.

And yet, it's your clubhouse that has put out the welcome mat for pedos.

http://www.dailydot.com/politi...

> But Google makes money from targeted advertising - and they need to see your data for that.

I'm no google apologist, but the problem with your analysis is that it is black and white. The question that really matters is how much of your data do they need for that? For example, their push for client-side PGP encrypted gmail means they don't get the content of your messages. They still get the metadata, but they don't get ALL of your data.

They seem to think that's still enough for them to make money - perhaps they've calculated that its better to keep users in the fold and get some data on them than to lose them to some other system where google gets no data on them.

The circle goes like this:

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Etc.

Or simply look at this graph. The reserve they shoot for is a function of the spending, and the spending is a function of how much money they have.

They still want to "scale up" much more. And they can *always* justify that they need a bigger reserve next year than this year by spending more in this year. So it's always just "prudent and sensible" to ask for more money than last year, whether the money was spent sensibly or not.

I don't think anyone minds if they spend more, if there is a commensurate benefit to the end user, such as enhanced quality and reliability, and readers are told honestly what their donations are supposed to fund. But 1. product quality has been lacking, and 2. none of this is about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" as the banner implies. The more they spend on paid staff, the smaller the proportion of their budget concerned with that actually becomes.

Just for a laugh, listen to Jimmy Wales speaking in 2005 about hosting, server and bandwidth costs. (Yes, articles are longer today, page views are 15 times higher than in 2005, but on the other hand bandwidth has become cheaper and there are economies of scale.)

Wikipedia has a significant problem with content related to this part of the world. Read How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia's history. There are similar problems in Indonesia – see Don’t Trust Wikipedia on Indonesia – and in South Africa: The political economy of wikiality: a South African inquiry into knowledge.

It's all got to do with why people contribute to Wikipedia.

What upsets me – and other volunteers – most is the "keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year" punchline in these banners. It's emotional manipulation, because it makes people think that Wikipedia is *lacking* funds to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year. That's ludicrously false, and it's not how a charity championing transparency should behave. It seems to me they're simply follow their Darwinian A/B testing and always plump for the banner that gets in more money per hour.

Apart from that, there is the issue of how the money is actually spent, and whether the spending has a tangible benefit for the end user. That's another big issue in its own right. There are weaknesses there too (see also this edit by Jimmy Wales – look for the words "miserable cost/benefit ratio"), but it's a separate issue from the banner wording.

First of all, a lot of money has been mis-spent. Sue Gardner herself voiced her qualms about this shortly before she left the Foundation, warning of the potential for log-rolling and corruption and spending money without benefit to the end user. In one case I have knowledge of, the entire board of a national Wikimedia organisation was flown into a city and put up in hotels for a "community consultation" where exactly one (1) community member turned up. That was $5,000 of donors' money gone right there, for nothing (although the board members all got a city stay out of it).

Secondly, some of the work done for that money has been incompetent. The VisualEditor, announced as "epically important" by Jimmy Wales, was a case in point. It was years late and so buggy and incomplete that the community switched the thing off, overriding the Foundation. It is my suspicion that this is partly a result of giving too many management and tech jobs to Wikipedia insiders selected on the basis of their enthusiasm for the Wikipedia ideal rather than their qualifications or expertise. Otherwise it's really hard to explain why jobs were done so badly. And that they were done badly is a fact that was acknowledged by Jimmy Wales, who said that Lila Tretikov was specifically hired to stop these sorts of failures and bring their house in order. And she may well do so.

But what to me is morally wrong about the banners is that they create the impression the Foundation is struggling financially to keep Wikipedia online without ads. And that's simply not the case. Wales used to boast how little it cost to keep Wikipedia online. In 2005, he said,

"So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that’s essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee We actually hired Brion [Vibber] because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.”

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation attracts 21 billion page views a month – i.e. 15 times as much – but even 15 times the $5,000 a month Wales mentioned then would only be $75,000 a month, or $900,000 a year; and that's without allowing for economies of scale, and the fact that bandwidth has become cheaper since 2005. Yes, they have more images these days and so forth, but keeping Wikipedia online simply isn't their major expense, and a fraction of the money they have in hand.

By all means say that Wikipedia is ad-free and relies on donations – that's perfectly true – but don't imply that donations are needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year, making everyone think that if not enough money comes in they'll have to pull the plug, or there will be ads by the end of next year. And that's a mainstream criticism within the Wikimedia movement. Just look at the Wikimedia mailing list discussion [gossamer-threads.com]. The person speaking there is this guy [wikipedia.org], a veteran volunteer, GLAMWiki coordinator and former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia.

First of all, a lot of money has been mis-spent. Sue Gardner herself voiced her qualms about this shortly before she left the Foundation, warning of the potential for log-rolling and corruption and spending money without benefit to the end user. In one case I have knowledge of, the entire board of a national Wikimedia organisation was flown into a city and put up in hotels for a "community consultation" where exactly one (1) community member turned up. That was $5,000 of donors' money gone right there, for nothing (although the board members all got a city stay out of it).

Secondly, some of the work done for that money has been incompetent. The VisualEditor, announced as "epically important" by Jimmy Wales, was a case in point. It was years late and so buggy and incomplete that the community switched the thing off, overriding the Foundation. It is my suspicion that this is partly a result of giving too many management and tech jobs to Wikipedia insiders selected on the basis of their enthusiasm for the Wikipedia ideal rather than their qualifications or expertise. Otherwise it's really hard to explain why jobs were done so badly. And that they were done badly is a fact that was acknowledged by Jimmy Wales, who said that Lila Tretikov was specifically hired to stop these sorts of failures and bring their house in order. And she may well do so.

But what to me is morally wrong about the banners is that they create the impression the Foundation is struggling financially to keep Wikipedia online without ads. And that's simply not the case. Wales used to boast how little it cost to keep Wikipedia online. In 2005, he said,

"So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that’s essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee We actually hired Brion [Vibber] because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.”

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation attracts 21 billion page views a month – i.e. 15 times as much – but even 15 times the $5,000 a month Wales mentioned then would only be $75,000 a month, or $900,000 a year; and that's without allowing for economies of scale, and the fact that bandwidth has become cheaper since 2005. Yes, they have more images these days and so forth, but keeping Wikipedia online simply isn't their major expense, and a fraction of the money they have in hand.

By all means say that Wikipedia is ad-free and relies on donations – that's perfectly true – but don't imply that donations are needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year, making everyone think that if not enough money comes in they'll have to pull the plug, or there will be ads by the end of next year. And that's a mainstream criticism within the Wikimedia movement. Just look at the Wikimedia mailing list discussion [gossamer-threads.com]. The person speaking there is this guy [wikipedia.org], a veteran volunteer, GLAMWiki coordinator and former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia.

It also gives anyone the ability to break things. Whatever you fix today, someone else can (and most likely will) break tomorrow.

Have a look How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia. Technical info is certainly not immune when it comes to these problems with reliability. Even worse, an incredible number of people accept stuff in Wikipedia without questioning it, to the extent that it gets repeated by sources deemed authoritative. Here is Wikipedia re-writing history, and here is a journalist who discovered she had accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax when she saw a journalist from The New Yorker quote a joke on Twitter as fact – a joke which she had entered in Wikipedia five years earlier for fun, as a stoned sophomore.

http://www.dailydot.com/techno...

Microsoft has them, K5 units. Plans to weaponize them with tazers and maybe something else later.

If a security robot can use a tazer on a human being, then they can use an AK-47 or AR-15 or anything else like a flame thrower.

Is the robot autonomous? Does that question matter when it aims a weapon at you and fires?

We might have an ED-209 situation here, malfunctioning robot that kills innocents.

I guess I missed the part where Uber is a government with the power to kill and imprison.

If you are (in your opinion) unfairly criticized, why is it unacceptable to criticize the criticizer?

Time and the Wall Street Journal recently ran op-eds opposing net neutrality without disclosing that the authors were paid shills for Verizon and others. Is it wrong to point this out?

Oh, and for the record, I think Uber is a bunch of shitbags who think the rules don't apply to them and are vulturing off formerly middle-class people who are now running their cars into the ground driving strangers around because the economy is so shitty they need a second job to make ends meet. But there's still nothing wrong with finding out whether a vocal critic has an ulterior motive.

Yet nobody seems to be considering the possibility that TOR simply isn't providing the anonymity that it claims

Well, yeah, because:
http://www.dailydot.com/politi...

However, upon further examination, no one could quite figure out where all supposedly seized hidden services were. After all, the biggest Dark Net markets are still in operation. The biggest child pornography sites are still running. In fact, the seized websites represent less than a third of Dark Net commerce.

Update Nov. 8, 8:31am: Far from the original number of 414 seized hidden services and lower even than the number 50 provided to the New York Times, the FBI told Forbes that it had seized 27 actual sites but 414 .onion addresses that all go to the same sites.

___
Seems pretty obvious that it was 27 websites all hit by the shellshock bug to give up their real IP.

This post means the police is busted about telling people encrypting their phones is a bad idea.

The city of Alamogordo: http://www.alamogordonews.com/... The person who dumped the cartridges in the first place: http://www.kboi2.com/news/loca... http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/... One of the archeologists on site running the dig: http://www.dailydot.com/geek/e... And the forthcoming documentary itself (which a rough cut was shown at Comicon, and Classic Gaming Expo), first presents that "mass burial of ET" myth and then deoncstructs it to show what was actually buried there.

The NSA does not need money.
Federal money comes with oversight.
Like so: http://www.nationaljournal.com...

They patent the tools they've designed, and then resell them to businesses. Claiming the profits for themselves to fund their activities outside of federal oversight:
http://www.dailydot.com/politi...

What they can do is basically limitless. They believe they can lie to congress, the whitehouse and the courts and likely don't even need federal funding at this point. I suspect their primary target is the whitehouse as the president is the only person that could really do anything about them at all.

Agreed

It's hard to imagine any site allowing 1,000,000 bad guesses

It probably varies by site, but methinks anything over 100 or so would trigger a response

Even if the limit was 1000, same outcome

Apparently, this guy had no problem trying to guess 20,000+ passwords for any account on iCloud, a security issue he disclosed to Apple six months before CelebGate.

But again, this must have been user error.

The theft of the photographs, a statement from the company insisted, was not the result of “any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud or Find my iPhone.”

The only thing Apple did wrong was not to educate its users about security.

“When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing.”

Women are no longer really the minority in gaming: http://www.dailydot.com/geek/adult-women-largest-gaming-demographic/

I gotta admit, that's one of those things I don't get among all of this.

"It's Jennifer's fault for putting valuable stuff on the Internet."
"It's the evil hacker's fault for breaking in."

How about we blame the large corporation that claimed that these things were secure when, in fact, they weren't secure and they had known about the issue for 6 months?

Oh yes, they do claim that. Jimmy Wales asserts that Wikipedia is "about as accurate as traditional encyclopedias and improving all the time." Really? Really? Really? Really? Really?

Oh yes, they do claim that. Jimmy Wales asserts that Wikipedia is "about as accurate as traditional encyclopedias and improving all the time." Really? Really? Really? Really? Really?

First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.

Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).

Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.

Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.

Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.

Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covert paid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.

I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.

First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.

Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).

Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.

Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.

Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.

Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covert paid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.

I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.

Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).

The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.

Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.

Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.

Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).

The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.

Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.

Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.

If early radio stations made audiences hate Otis Redding through bungling decision-making then black music would have been pushed back

Are you trying to say that Gamasutra made someone hate feminists through bungling decision-making?

If so, who? And didn't they already hate feminists?

If you really care about actual social progress, you should be able to discriminate between good paths toward improving the world, worthy of defending, and catastrophic setbacks like this one.

"Catastrophic setbacks"? What? Where is the catastrophic setback? Are we concerned that the cause of feminism has been set back among misogynists?

I assume you are just picking a the side in a fight that will make you feel like a good person.

Not so much. I pick the side in a fight that's opposite the side that needs to have its ass kicked. Here:

http://www.dailydot.com/societ...

So trust me.

No. You are what's known as a "concern troll". http://www.wisegeek.com/what-i...

Not all of us think that. Some of us think "Puny European Countries". Have you seen an overlay of Europe verses the USA?

Have you seen a map of Europe? All of it, I mean. I have. Your map sure doesn't look like it. Apparently Poland is no longer European? Or Hungary? Or Finland? Etc.

Here's a slightly better example. Just eyeballing, it looks like all of Europe together (including places like Greece and Romania and Finland, etc.) is probably bigger than the lower 48 states of the US.

And please, stop with that ridiculous "population density" canard. Finland has better broadband than the US. Iceland has better broadband than the US. Former Soviet Bloc countries Bulgaria and Romania have better broadband than the US. Heck, even Utah has better broadband than most of the rest of the US, and Utah isn't exactly known as a cheek-by-jowl, high-population center. I live in Seattle, within the city limits in a reasonably dense part of town, and I can only wish I had a 50mbps symmetric up-down connection for $70 a month. Instead, the best deal I could find was an entry-level business plan bundled with phone service at 4mbps down / 1.5mbps up, for roughly $125 a month. Laughably bad, painfully expensive, infuriatingly limited.

The key common thread in the success cases is that the major ISPs don't get to dictate broadband policy. Population density and size of the country pretty much has jack shit to do with the issue (unless you want to go into meta-arguments about the size and density of a polity and how that impacts public policy).

Cheers,

It's exactly the other way round, according to this Huffpost piece. There are 99 million more monthly female visitors to the various social media sites (included in the analysis were Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, last.fm, deviantART, Google+, Digg, Bebo, Reddit and many others). Even in gaming, the largest demographic are now adult women.

If you take things on people's say-so, you end up with this. Reliability is bad as it is – looking at an article, you can never be sure, without checking the references, whether it is a bunch of nonsense or a well-researched, accurate article. But if you allow everyone – well-intentioned, knowledgeable people like yourself as well as pranksters and hoaxers – to add stuff without citations, the site would quickly be corrupted altogether. No one can tell if you are sincere or making stuff up out of whole cloth.

Kozierok's First Law: "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."

some might be scarred by truly twisted specimens of the otherwise beautiful, smart, nice, charming side of our species.
http://www.dailydot.com/society/pycon-dongle-joke-misogyny-sexism-adria-richards/

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

I wouldn't be so sure:

http://www.dailydot.com/lol/ch...

Can you imagine Google doing this? It would ruin their business model entirely as they could not use keyword based ads.

You don't have to imagine. They are already working on it.

So, that I know of, no ISP has a program where they police what you do

Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, Cablevision, AT&T, and Cavalier Telephone do. The last one was my DLS ISP around 2008. I got email notifications from them for downloading with bittorrent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.dailydot.com/news/c...

From here, the sequence of events is relatively undisputed. With Hammond equipped and as FBI agents reportedly watched on, AntiSec began plundering Stratforâ(TM)s financial information and personal records. Monsegur convinced Hammond and others to unknowingly transfer âoemultiple gigabytes of confidential dataâ to one of the FBIâ(TM)s servers. That included the roughly 60,000 credit card numbers and records for Stratfor customers that Hammond was ultimately charged with stealing.

This is going to piss off a lot of very powerful people who were on that customer & credit card list.

In this case, that took the form of a lot of people on the internet pointing out that he had taken certain actions with which they personally disagreed.

"a lot of people on the internet" can sound more numerous than they really are. See: How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts

Never mind that, already happened. What I'm waiting for is the distributed malware creators realizing they can't keep up with the ASICs and using the malware to attack the bitcoin network itself instead. It doesn't even need to be as spectacular as a true 51% attack; just having the ability to induce jerks in the bitcoin price opens the door to "insider financial speculation" and profit. In fact, there are good indications *that* already happened / is happening, too.

Even if not, an instructive example is that Tor incident that was on /. a few months ago. An interesting (or should I say "chilling"?) observation that was not in the summary is that Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum believed that the malware creators had a sufficient share of the Tor nodes in their hands to fatally compromise Tor's security. There are good reasons to speculate they didn't have a deeper motive than using Tor for controlling their botnet, but it's still food for thought, especially for those who believe (like me) that Tor was designed more with security in mind than Bitcoin...

More like a year: http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/marc-maron-podcast-patent-interview/

Last month Personal Audio filed lawsuits against three of the biggest podcasting companies: How Stuff Works, TogiEntertainment, Inc., and ACE Broadcasting, which produces the Adam Carolla Show and other podcasts. Smaller podcasters, like Maron, also received letters from Personal Audio inviting them to license the patent for a fee.

The article is dated March 12, 2013.

Which is over a year, therefore "years." Duh.

More like a year: http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/marc-maron-podcast-patent-interview/

Last month Personal Audio filed lawsuits against three of the biggest podcasting companies: How Stuff Works, TogiEntertainment, Inc., and ACE Broadcasting, which produces the Adam Carolla Show and other podcasts. Smaller podcasters, like Maron, also received letters from Personal Audio inviting them to license the patent for a fee.

The article is dated March 12, 2013.

. . . because the NSA stated yesterday that tech companies were fully aware of snooping the who time (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/03/20/1745254/nsa-general-counsel-insists-us-companies-assisted-in-data-collection).

Not only aware, not one to let a dime slip by: "Billing invoices and other documents show Microsoft charging the FBI hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to comply with legal requests for customer information," http://www.dailydot.com/news/m...

"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching[1].

Tor[2], the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents[3] produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

http://slashdot.org/submission...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/techno...
[2] https://www.torproject.org/
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/pr...

Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger

"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching[1].

Tor[2], the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents[3] produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

http://slashdot.org/submission...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/techno...
[2] https://www.torproject.org/
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/pr...

Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger

"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching[1].

Tor[2], the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents[3] produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

http://slashdot.org/submission...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/techno...
[2] https://www.torproject.org/
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/pr...

Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger

"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching[1].

Tor[2], the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents[3] produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

http://slashdot.org/submission...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/techno...
[2] https://www.torproject.org/
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/pr...

Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger

"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching[1].

Tor[2], the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents[3] produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

http://slashdot.org/submission...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/techno...
[2] https://www.torproject.org/
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/pr...

Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger

"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching[1].

Tor[2], the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents[3] produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

http://slashdot.org/submission...

[1] http://www.dailydot.com/techno...
[2] https://www.torproject.org/
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/pr...

"Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching.

Tor, the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

Well, if they are not keeping record of how the person was originally reported C would be of no relevance. Kind of like when an Anonymous person calls the cops because of a suspicious guy taking money from people in cars and returning small baggies, the cops may or may not enter that as evidence. In many cases they don't because it's of no value to the case.

In the case of all these cameras however, the public should be demanding to know how much impact it has since they are paying for it. It's quite possible they didn't know that the program existed, or the extent of the program. Look at how Seattle reacted. (Link to Seattle issue just in case.)

Trying to hoodwink us with your fairy tales again, Cold Fjord ?

Just a few days ago NSA admitted that they have NO IDEA HOW EXTENSIVE IS THE SNOWDEN'S SECRET FILE COLLECTION ( http://www.dailydot.com/politics/nsa-snowden-files-unknown/ ) and the one who has the BIGGEST PANIC ATTACK is NSA, not Russia, not China, and of course, not the Germans.

The fact that the Berlin apartment of one Jacob Appelbaum was invaded, with 3 of his 4 alarms cut off, and his computers tempered with, signifies the SHEER PANIC ATTACKS NSA is suffering right now !

Had the Ruskies so hard up for the files, Edward Snowden is IN THEIR HAND RIGHT NOW and KGB sure knows a lot of ways to GET RESULT OUT OF PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO TELL THEM ANYTHING.

And btw, Cold Fjord, you are NOT the only one who has worked in clandestine projects.

Or restoring it a day or two later without explanation of whether it was because of the bad PR or a completely screwed up customer support process in replacing a faulty Kindle. http://www.dailydot.com/news/amazon-linn-nygaard-deleted-account-restored/