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I do have to say that comments on this thread have the lowest signal to noise ratio (or I should say "signal to troll ratio") of any comment thread I've ever seen on slashdot.

Anybody have anything to say about the actual report? (or about the draft report-- NPR apparently got a prerelease version, but the actual final version is due to be released at 2pm today.

If you don't like NPR, here are some other sources:

https://phys.org/news/2017-11-climate-real.html

http://blog.ucsusa.org/rachel-licker/what-is-the-national-climate-assessment-the-most-comprehensive-report-on-climate-change-in-the-u-s

http://www.themorningsun.com/article/MS/20170822/LOCAL1/170829886

And links to the actual document:

PDF file draft as of June 2017: https://assets.documentcloud.o...

New York Times link to the draft report: https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

National Academy of Sciences Review of the Draft report: https://nas-sites.org/americas...

There's no mystery because the plan to decommission the servers was put in place in March after the security research found the holes and got the FBI involved.
The plan was to implement recommendations made by the FBI and security researchers in March.
The suit was filed on July 3, the first server was wiped on July 7, and the lawsuit was served to the Kennesaw attorney's on July 10.
Here's a FOIA document of Kennesaw's UIT plans and sequence of events.
https://www.documentcloud.org/...

It's long, but it's obvious to anyone that's been in IT that the wipe is part of a planned upgrade and not the result of some plot.
One thing the news got wrong is that the data is not gone, it was moved to the new servers as part of the upgrade.

Also, the state is going to retrieve the FBI's forensic copy.
https://www.documentcloud.org/...

More info:
https://www.politico.com/magaz...
http://www.politico.com/magazi...

There's no mystery because the plan to decommission the servers was put in place in March after the security research found the holes and got the FBI involved.
The plan was to implement recommendations made by the FBI and security researchers in March.
The suit was filed on July 3, the first server was wiped on July 7, and the lawsuit was served to the Kennesaw attorney's on July 10.
Here's a FOIA document of Kennesaw's UIT plans and sequence of events.
https://www.documentcloud.org/...

It's long, but it's obvious to anyone that's been in IT that the wipe is part of a planned upgrade and not the result of some plot.
One thing the news got wrong is that the data is not gone, it was moved to the new servers as part of the upgrade.

Also, the state is going to retrieve the FBI's forensic copy.
https://www.documentcloud.org/...

More info:
https://www.politico.com/magaz...
http://www.politico.com/magazi...

The server was wiped the day after a lawsuit was filed to preserve the server as evidence.

That's a tighter time frame than I'd read elsewhere, but let's run with it since you always seem to know what you're talking about.

So since the lawsuit was filed on July 3, that means the server would have been wiped on July 4, two days before legal notice of the lawsuit was served on even one of the defendants on July 6, and six days before the earliest date the plaintiff even claims the defendant that had possession of the server got notice.

I think you'd best go shopping for another canister of smoke for that gun.

Still, if you're wiping data coincidentally right after you find out you're being investigated, it's suspicious.

The "right after you find out" part of the story is problematic too. There's no automatic process that notifies defendants when someone files a lawsuit against them -- it's the responsibility of the plaintiff to "serve" (think process server) a copy of the complaint and court summons to each defendant. The plaintiff then files a "certificate of service" with the court with the who/what/when/how details.

Here, the certificate of service says that a FedEx copy was sent overnight on July 5 personally addressed to Brian Kemp at his address in the State Capitol building, first named defendant and chair of the state election board. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they made the FedEx pickup deadline, the earliest Brian Kemp could have seen it was sometime on July 6 (assuming he was even around that day, it got to the top of his mail stack, etc.). The certificate of service also says that a copy was emailed to Kemp's general counsel Ryan Germany, who in that role probably gets more than a few emails about new and pending lawsuits and thus may or may not have read it on the 6th.

That's fairly tight timing already just as to Kemp, but the above doesn't even pertain to the defendant at issue, the Center for Election Systems. The earliest notice they got appears to be on July 10, three days after the hard drive was wiped. You'll notice in the Ars Technica article I linked that the plaintiffs' representative doesn't really drum up the July 7 hard drive wiping as being suspicious. That in and of itself pretty much tells the tale -- giving up a cherry supposed smoking gun like that basically confirms that there's no way she could claim that CES had notice earlier than the 10th. And the event she does point to (the subsequent erasure of the backups a month later) seems an awful lot more like a measured step someone would allow to happen after confirming that the FBI's forensic image still existed than a desperate scramble to destroy relevant information. Their backups likely were file copies rather than bit-for-bit forensic copies anyway and thus wouldn't even be redundant to the FBI's forensic image -- they would be pretty much irrelevant.

Lawsuits are often won and lost over timelines, and the plaintiffs are doing everything they can to try to make this one look suspicious. Can't fault lawyers for doing their job. But given all the above points as well as the broader story in my original post, In my opinion there's just no there there.

So, the idea of "sovereign immunity" in the USA is found in the 11th Amendment which says:

"The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State."

There was a recent ruling that said this applies to the IPR process. This is all quite new, so there haven't been a lot of cases around it yet and this is the first time someone has tried to use this so far. Someone saw that ruling, found a tribe to go along with the licensing scheme, and then used it as a defense in court. This is why the ruling in the case about the Indian tribes goes on about whether or not to join the Indian tribe to the case--that's a procedural trick they're trying to employ.

Disclaimer: Everything about this is complicated, if you're looking at this for reasons beyond idle curiosity, get a lawyer.

Plaintiff defines "e-mail” to include features such as an inbox, outbox, folders, a “to:” line, a “from:” line, a “subject:” line, the body of the message and the ability to include attachments, and the ability to copy (“cc”) or blind copy (“bcc”) other recipients. (See Compl. 13). However, that is not the only definition. For example, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “e-mail” in far more general terms as “a means or system for transmitting messages electronically (as between two computers on a network.” E-mail, MERRIAM-WEBSTER, https://www.merriamwebster.com... (last visited Aug. 31, 2017). Similarly, in the context of a patent dispute, the Federal Circuit has held that “a person of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized that an electronic mail message must include a destination address and must have the capacity to include an address of an originating processor, message content (such as text or an attachment), and a subject.” In re NTP, Inc., 654 F.3d 1279, 1289 (Fed. Cir. 2011). Accordingly, whether plaintiff’s claim to have invented e-mail is “fake” depends upon the operative definition of “e-mail.” Because that definition does not have a single, objectively correct answer, the claim is incapable of being proved true or false.

Given that most messaging systems prior to any formalized RFCs would fall under some sort of "email" designation, it would be hard to prove that they are in fact the original "email" that was invented. What is clear would be that the plaintiff would not be the first.

Is the patent valid? Well according to this judge and jury yes, according to most of us probably not. The patent covers using a 3-axis accelerometer and some sort of data processing to detect motion of a body.

The patent doesn't actually cover that. In fact, the background of the patent admits that using an accelerometer and data processing to detect motion of a body was well known:

In point of fact, many methods are known for sensing body movement, or non-movement (i.e., sensed dynamic accelerations, including cessation of movement), as well as, for sensing body movement over time, which is commonly used to determine comparative levels of activity of a monitored body (See, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,110,741, 4,292,630, 5,045,839, and 5,523,742).

For a guess - you didn't actually read the patent, you just went by the Slashdot summary?

I haven't done a prior art search or read the patent closely, but I did look at the jury form. Interestingly, it only asks two questions going to invalidity of the patent - did Nintendo prove that the patent lacked sufficient written description, and did Nintendo prove that the patent lacked enablement. In other words, Nintendo apparently didn't find any prior art to invalidate the patent. That should be a clue that it's a bit narrower than just "using an accelerator and a processor to detect motion".

But please read the full memo with links before settling on an opinion. I was listening to NPR just two days ago and they resorted to straw man arguments and condemnation without being truthful about what it's contents were. Also keep in mind it was written as an internal reply in response to a specific request by google for controversial thoughts on improving workplace diversity practices.

He did not claim "women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers"

He did state "the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech". In short, he stated that biological causes result in distribution of preferences.

In slashdot, our submitters did the best to avoid misrepresentation for the previous submissions. In this case, joshtops is 100% responsible for this false representation.

After reading many comments, I agree with you. Most people are exposed to a few quotes and snippets, provided by the media to drive sales and spark outrage. The entire text is not unreasonable, and should be seriously considered because it challenges paradigms.

There is clearly a difference between interest and aptitude. For instance, many career focused websites have assessments for each. Maybe it is time to look at the data with open minds, and without bias.

Here is a link to the original for those who are brave enough to form their own opinion.

For example, if an employee expresses an opinion that non-whites are inferior, he can do so, but he can then also be fired.

Welcome to reality.

Sure. And if an an employee expresses an opinion that women are inferior, he can do so, and then also be fired. We could go on listing more hypothetical examples that did not actually happen.

If you are claiming the contrary that one of the aforementioned scenarios has actually occurred then it should be easy enough to prove by pointing out the exact text of the "Google Manifesto" where the assertion is made. The entire text is online.

Here are some spoon-fed links to make it even easier, or you can search for it on your own:

1. Original memo with citations intact (PDF)
2. Archived click-bait that had removed the citations

he outright asserted, based on no proof or bad science, that women have "more anxiety" and are somehow biologically not suited to be engineers.

Congratulations, you revealed yourself to have not read the paper. Citation please.

you're kidding, right? all of page four. bald, sexist assertions. no citations to, well, anything. here, i'll help:

Personality differences

Women, on average, have more:

• Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).
  • These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
• Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
  • This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.
• Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).
  • This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

all of this is pseudoscientific bs backed by nothing.

what woman would be willing to work with such a toolbox?

Any woman willing to discuss facts and science.

of which this "memo" is sorely lacking.

The PDF version is probably the best:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf

I find https://www.documentcloud.org/... to be a better source of the memo honestly.

Or can you tolerate someone against diversity and hostile towards women when you're under scrutiny and already in trouble for not being diverse enough and having a workplace climate hostile to women?

I read his memo and didn't see really anything saying he was against diversity per say, it was more constructive criticism on how to improve the existing approaches being used when I read it.

Perhaps you could elaborate a bit more in context what you mean by your comment based off the document linked above?

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

The may be in trouble for firing him, but they would have been in trouble, too, if they didn't.

Or can you tolerate someone against diversity and hostile towards women when you're under scrutiny and already in trouble for not being diverse enough and having a workplace climate hostile to women?

All that is left for Google now is to guess which side will be cheaper to settle with.

It's obvious that you didn't read the article. Please point out the section where he was hostile. The document is found here: https://www.documentcloud.org/...

>But didn't he also argue that an entire group of his coworkers had inherently less potential than other groups simply based on their gender?

Where did he argue that?

Here is his actual post: https://www.documentcloud.org/...

Feel free to where he argued that women have less potential than men.

He is not anti-diversity, even though the mainstream media like to repeat this as if it had any basis in reality, in fact he comes up with many interesting ways to increase diversity. Its the current methods that do not work at google for increasing diversity that he is criticizing.

Also linking the original, unmodified memo might be a good idea too:

https://diversitymemo.com/
https://assets.documentcloud.o...
And for those that use Zeronet:
http://127.0.0.1:43110/1MUeJj6...

This is what drives people away from mainstream media and leads them to label them wholesale as fake news.

You didn't read the essay https://www.documentcloud.org/...

Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these
differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why
we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences
are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything
about an individual given these population level distributions

Suggestions
I hope it’s clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that
we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of
those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that
don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender
roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another
member of their group (tribalism).

You condemn him while you and he are in agreement

https://www.documentcloud.org/...

Find the line where he harassed anyone.
Find the line where he called others inferior.
Give us the quotes to back up your assertion.

For anyone who's looking, I found the original version: Motherboard have posted it here. It's got a whole bunch of links: some are to opinion pieces, some are to scientific studies, and some are to Wikipedia articles which in turn reference a bunch of scientific studies.

Someone at Gizmodo should be shot or sued for editing the memo, "Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber," by removing the references—"hyperlinks," as they call them. The hyperlinks are to many scholarly journal pieces and otherwise respectable publications. Without the references to back up the author's claims, he just looks like a boob to most folks.

Here is a link to a PDF that contains all the hyperlinks to references and also two missing figures left out from the Gizmodo version.

https://assets.documentcloud.o...

It's clear you didn't read the essay.
https://www.documentcloud.org/...

After the controversy swelled, Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, sent a statement to staff condemning Damore's views and reaffirmed the company's stance on diversity. In internal discussion boards, multiple employees said they supported firing the author, and some said they would not choose to work with him, according to postings viewed by Bloomberg News.

Looks like Google decided to help Damore make his case by reinforcing their bias against differing opinion. Science also supports (mirror) his conclusions.

I'd like to see the actual indictment

Aaaaand here it is.

OK - looks he has some past and that's catching up with him now - bummer or ??? at least, he seemed to do some good on this WannaCry remedy.
Who knows...

I'd like to see the actual indictment

Aaaaand here it is.

Or, you know, you could make an argument as to why they would use race as an input.

But for the record, Race is not an input.

Since the article that reports this has followed the standard media practice of never, ever linking to the paper whose results you're mangling, here's a link to the original. You're pretty close, the top tool is LogMeIn, followed by Citrix, followed by TeamViewer. Looks like we need to get those banned under the CFAA as hacker tools.

Why change the red light grace period? Red light is red light.

If you want to reduce accidents, increase the yellow period. People who push the limits of an extended yellow don't deserve grace. All this is going to do is now make people more comfortable running a little bit of red.

From the summary: "following recommendations part of a recent study of its red-light cameras. " https://www.documentcloud.org/...

or, short version here: https://www.cityofchicago.org/...

No, seriously, read it. You'll love it - it's got golden showers in it.

But I do know a security risk when I see one.

Well, I guess your handle says it all.

Speaking of Trump and security . . .

I'm an American. I'll been knee to no stinking "king" - not one over two millennia dead and not the one the Russians helped to elect. Tell your masters in Moscow that when we've dealt with their puppet, we'll be turning out attention to them!

Here ya go!

Could Bill have been blackmailed for this? I mean, compared to water sports anything involving a cigar has got to be pretty tame, eh?

"Administrivia". Okay, try some adult literature. It's a PDF - you know, one of those technical things.

I'll admit Bill did some kinda plain lookin' women - but at least he doesn't need to buy his brides from "Russian-Brides.com" - and he didn't need rubber sheets.

Ask a grownup if you need help with the big words.

Why wasn't this document released on WikiLeaks? Perhaps because there is something like "honor among thieves"?

I agree with the current administration that privacy is counter to keeping us safe and making America great again. Let's start with this document.

Your notion for believing that anything would be different/better is foolish. The text of the rules indicate "access to all (lawful) destinations on the Internet" (paragraph 15). Make TPB an "unlawful" place to visit, and you have the same blocking in place. Worse, once that happens, it is easier to then toss more unfavorable–or politically inconvenient–sites on that list.

But if you read the 9th Circuit Courts opinion, you'd see that the reason they decided as they did was that Trump's order was too broad, excluding not only "aliens", but also potentially lawful residents who are non-citizens, such as visa holders, and others who may have been lawfully in the United States and left temporarily. If the order had been limited to those with no legal standing in the U.S. at all, the opinion might have been different.

Yes, Republicans used their only African-American senator, Time Scott, to speak for Jeff Sessions. No big surprise that he is supporting his party.

Saying that Corretta Scott King was thanking Jeff Sessions for the Rosa Parks Library is rather misleading. She was just acknowledging his presence. There was no thank you in the speech to Jeff Sessions. He was just acknowledged as being there along with all the other notable people in attendance. She was given a list of names to read for the opening of the library; his name was on the list. If you actually watch the video she has to pause and force herself to even read the name and she does not look happy about it.

Jeff Sessions was not liked by Coretta Scott King, you can read her letter for yourself:

https://www.documentcloud.org/...

Sean Spicer said “I can only hope that if she was still with us today, that after getting to know him and to see his record and his commitment to voting and civil rights, that she would” regret her opposition. In some right wing news this is being used as a claim that if Coretta Scott King were alive today she would support Jeff Sessions; that is another alternative fact being put out by the right.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Jeff Sessions has a 20% voting record on civil-rights according to the ACLU, which are some of the major issues it is now his job to protect. He has a 7% voting record for African-American issues according to the NAACP. Jeff Sessions has called the NAACP, the ACLU, and other civil rights groups "un-American."

http://www.ontheissues.org/Dom...

Jeff Sessions allegedly told a black attorney that the Ku Klux Klan was "OK until I found out they smoked pot." Sessions used to call a black assistant U.S. attorney that worked for him, Thomas Figures, "boy." When asked about the comment "Sessions apologized and said the remark was a joke." Personally, I don't accept the excuse every time a politician is caught making a racist statement that they were just making a joke and telling an African-American that you think the KKK is OK isn't very funny.

Jeff Sessions believes government services should only be available in English even though the US has no official language.

Jeff Sessions refused to support the removal of a racist judge who said black people "don't want to work" and that affirmative action is repugnant. Sessions said that the judge was "insensitive at worst."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics...

http://fortune.com/2016/11/19/...

Nothing is simply binary. If it was, we wouldn't have courts at all. We'd just have a machine that you entered parameters into and out popped the decision. The constitution also involves things like civil liberties, equal protection before the law, and other aspects meant to insure that the government can be held to a certain standard. Now maybe the decisions being made won't stand up to the appeals, and that's how the courts themselves are checked, with SCOTUS being the final arbiter of whether a law, executive order or regulation fits within constitutional constraints. But the whole point of the American system of government is that no branch has some sort of unreviewable and absolute power.

In this particular case, the judge is making a ruling based on the law itself, and contains references to case law. So before you declare it invalid, perhaps you should actually read it.he signing and implementation of this Executive Order. It can be found here, so since you clearly view yourself as a constitutional and legal expert, explain precisely where the TRO goes off the rails? After all, it is a Temporary Restraining Order, and the government will have another opportunity to defend itself against the States.

I already explained the "debunking" is both selective and silly and gave you the source to watch. The same "standard" isn't held for any of the facts in the report, which are dropping like flies. The fact that you want FISA warrants to look into 4chan erotic fanfics just makes this even more hilarious.

I mean, you haven't even caught on to half of my throwaway jokes yet...

I love that you do not provide any actual evidence here. Please note what qualifies as a evidence here. I want real docs, not anonymous rumors laundered through the press, so spare me the CNN, NYT, BuzzFeed, WaPo, etc. links and look at who they claim to have gotten it from and what they have to back it up. You've got what? Basically, this MI6 opposition researcher who sources absurd erotic fanfics while writing the DNC's "research"? The same anonymous fake agents whose tricks I took the piss out of both last week and in my last post?

I'll save you some time, it appears to start with this story by Louise Mensch, then laundered through Julian Borger at the Guardian, which ultimately claims there are "two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community." Why yes, I do love unverifiable info from anonymous people who are allegedly part of our most secret and least trustworthy court! That's practically the golden standard of proof these days! We can't provide you with our evidence, it's classified! But we can totally feed random nonsense to BuzzFeed, CNN, and the rest of the fake news.

The funnies part is that I thought they'd learned their lesson by now, but no, they just had to swallow that ridiculous BuzzFeed story about pissing on Obama's bed. Yes, it's really that absurd if you haven't seen it yet. It's on page 2, bullet #3:

However, there were other aspects to TRUMP's engageement with the Russian authorities. One of which had borne fruit for them was to exploit TRUMP's personal obsessions and sexual peversion in order to obtain suitable 'kompromat' (compromising material) on him. According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP's (peprverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform 'golden showers' (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with micropohones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.

Exercise for the reader: Next time you get anonymous crap, try looking into the journalist whose byline appears instead of pointing to the anonymous secret agents. Find other stories they've written. Look at patterns and "sources."

He's probably busy reading the report saying Russian compromised Trump.

YouTube has proof from 2011 that it's real! It's totally not a 4chan troll fanfic that made the front page of CNN right now. We have really good reasons to believe documents even BuzzFeed won't vouch for!

There have been many posts in this thread that claim there was no conclusive evidence to support Obama's claims re: the Russian hacking. That is simply not true. Below is a link the the report from the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) with a detailed forensic analysis that clearly identifies the source as Russian intelligence services. The are planning to release an even more detailed report very soon.

https://assets.documentcloud.o...

While I agree that IBM should take a stand against violating civil liberties, Ginni Rometty's letter makes no offer to make such violations. It avoids the issue all together. Instead it offers a list of valuable and generally inoffensive services to the President-Elect.

It seems to me, that these IBM employee's are mad their company hasn't acted belligerently toward the future President. That would just be uncivil, and bad business. Ms. Rometty has instead been cordial and offered services that are well within the bounds of the the US Constitution.