Slashdot Mirror

Ey up... here are some images of t' alleged Yorkshire aliens' purported spacecraft.

I guess I badly overestimated how much newsreading Slashdot does but it's currently the top Science story on Google News (tragically) and is getting reprinted all over the fuck.

https://news.google.com/news/rtc?ncl=dnKMHzxjFcOnzwM_UbabG5Mw_uKHM&topic=snc&siidp=c91213d6efdc327274530d68fc4346a67566

My take-home on this is that perhaps people are starting to question the Russian institutionalized fascination paranormal psuedo-science.

There's a couple of apps for Android that can automatically turn on and off wifi depending on you're location. The one I ended up with was Llama. It uses cell tower IDs to identify your areas (home, work, etc.) and then you select various actions that activate when entering or leaving those areas (such as turning on/off wifi, bluetooth, changing ringer volume, etc.)

here's the patent from 2000
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6031852.pdf

instead of an LCD, which are slow, the inventors used an accoustoptic modulator as the pattern former. Those are fast. In fact they are so fast they could also use the pattern former to sweep the wavelength in real time or q switch the laser.

It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that. They are just mad they don't have a piece of the action.

Regardless of their ability to spy on their own people I think this is a good thing and I say that as a red, white and blue American citizen. I don't like that we control the whole ball of wax. Its time other countries stepped things up and built on what the US started. The internet is supposed to be bigger than any one country.

What happens is that the internet gets fractured - you'll have the "US Intenret", the "Brazil Internet" just like we have the "Iran Internet", and to a lesser extent, the "China Internet". All little networks running separate and independent.

Or not. TFA says:

Most of Brazil’s global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff’s government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.

A connection from Brazil to Europe, or connections from Brazil to other South American nations, don't constitute a "Brazil internet"; for one thing, the other ends of those connections aren't located in Brazil. If that were sufficient to create a "Brazil internet", there would already be a "US internet" given that the US has an undersea connection to Europe or connections to Canada and Mexico.

It also says:

Rousseff is urging Brazil’s Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.

That wouldn't, in and of itself, mean that Brazilians can't find non-Brazilian sites with Google or that non-Brazilians can't find Brazilian sites with Google; it would mean that Google would have to add one or more data centers in Brazil and, for Google searches from within Brazil (presumably meaning "from IP addresses that are located in Brazil"), any information saved about the search would have to be stored on the Brazilian servers (and, presumably, not sent to non-Brazilian servers). It would also mean that Google+ posts from Brazilian users would have to be stored on the Brazilian servers, GMail messages for Brazilian users' accounts would have to be stored on the Brazilian servers, etc. (and, presumably, not sent to non-Brazilian servers).

Today the internet is bigger than any one country - even the NSA can't tap all of it, and it's likely the stuff they tapped they did things like running TOR exit nodes and monitored the data that way.

But tomorrow, the internet will shrivel up (hey, we don't need IPv6 anymore!) as every country runs its own version of the internet, and wanting to connect to the bigger part around it well, you're a terrorist.

I haven't seen anything to indicate that Brazil doesn't want to allow packets to enter or leave Brazil - quite the contrary, in fact, if they want additional connections to countries outside Brazil. That's what would be involved in "each country [running] its own version of the internet".

Ars is not a technical website. They are a tech news site.

I said I thought they were a "technical oriented website", contrasted to HuffPost which is a generalist news site (any political bias aside).

Ars seems to consider themselves to be technically oriented: Serving the Technologist for more than a decade. IT new, reviews, and analysis.

Look, I obviously pissed off some people who hold Ars in high esteem. All I was getting at is I felt the piece was a little fluffy, light on technical details, and oriented at laymen. Not the website for me, although it probably brings value and enjoyment to millions of people who are not me. Live and let live.

Three years ago, we had competition among the insurance companies.

Hardly. There were very few and all were (and remain) harshly and strictly regulated.

Except that it cost twice as much per capita and delivered poorer outcomes in terms of lifespan, disability, and time-to-treatment than most of the socialist programs

Somehow I doubt, you can get the government health-care to pay for your gender-change in Cuba (or even in the UK), but in the US insurers are obligated to cover the procedure for all. And that's just one example...

The government made all of us a giant disfavor decades ago by allowing employers to deduct employees' health-insurance from taxes. This tied "healthplans" to employment, crowded individuals out of the insurance market and made insurers cater not to actual individuals, but to their employers. Likewise doctors and hospitals began cater to the insurers more and more, rather than the patients.

It was bad, but it went to even worse with Obamacare...

Can you tell me why you think the more structurally sound free-market healthcare, when implemented in the US, was so much worse than the structurally defective NHS implemented in the UK?

I'm unaware of any objective comparison of health-care availability and quality between the two countries. Anecdotal evidence is certainly mixed to put it mildly...

Well not really but they did have a project that they cancled that I used. Google Health. I guess they can restart that up. http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/health/about/

Here are 1.3 million pieces of evidence:
https://www.google.com/search?q=IE+security+zone+exploit

As explained US_CERT, the US Computer Emergency response team:

> There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model,
> local file system (Local Machine Zone) trust, the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) document object model (in particular,
> proprietary DHTML features), the HTML Help system, MIME type determination, the graphical user interface (GUI),
> and ActiveX. IE is integrated into Windows to such an extent that vulnerabilities in IE frequently provide an
> attacker significant access to the operating system.

Microsoft winked a acknowledgement the root of the problem yesterday with their advisory about this particular
vulnerability. Microsoft's advisory says:

> By default, all supported versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, and Windows Mail open HTML
> email messages in the Restricted sites zone.

That's as opposed to the Local Intranet Zone, the Trusted Sites Zone, etc. IE opens content in the restricted zone (cage) and hope that there isn't a leak, like hoping that lion doesn't reach out of the cage. (and hope that IE picked the right zone to start with - web sites and batch files are both .com addresses.) Opera doesn't need to try to keep web sites from accessing functions in the local computer zone - there is no local zone, it just does web sites.

If your browser doesn't run shell batch files and registry patches, it doesn't have to decide which batch files to run in what context. It simply doesn't run batch files, or do anything else but show web pages.

Name one decent off contract phone for less than [$250].

The Nexus 4. It may be a little old now, but it's still decent. $199.

No other administration has circumvented the three branches or government and/or the constitution with the abuse of executive power worse than the tyrant known as Obama.

Take a gander through the links at https://www.google.com/search?q=\device\video5+Nvlddmkm

Nvidia's 32x.xx drivers have actually been destroying hardware

We*What? WeChat! Well, I use GoSMS

Ohh wiat, it too, has Asian origins. Anyone see a trend here? I see one.

It doesn't have to be POSIX compliant to have it ported to it and it doesn't require somebody to pay for licensing. With the Features of ZFS one could argue that a port to at least Windows Server would be great and it would garnish quite a following from those who've had to put up with the way NTFS views disk volumes and storage. There are applications that run well on Windows, especially on the Server side of things so I wouldn't call it dead quite yet. Besides, with Server 2012 we now have Storage Spaces and ReFS which brings some ZFS features to the table, but it's nowhere as sophisticated ad ZFS. There's already been one attempt but it doesn't appear to be actively maintained and it's read only. Oracle has software for Windows Server that interfaces to the Sun ZFS Storage Server (SAN) that works at the VSS level. It's not exposing a ZFS filesystem to windows either, but ZFS is configurable in the SAN. That's a hefty uplift if you're already in deep with EMC or NetApp.

> It's a fair assumption that a home has just 1 laptop/PC

In the Western world? It seems to be increasing, and closer to two currently.

"I have a very special service for rich people..." "Oh yes," said Ford, intrigued but careful, "and what's that?" "I tell them it's ok to be rich."

Actually, our planet has a whole industry telling poor people it's their fault for being poor and misdirecting their justifiable anger.

People always complain that the march of technology will put people out of jobs, historically this has always been proven false.

The issue here is one of similar contexts. If the current situation is the same as all the historical situations, then we can expect the same results. This is simple expectation learning from historical examples.

I claim that the context is different this time. Looking at GDP per capita, we see the aggregate purchasing power is higher than the level needed for everyone to survive.

Standard economic theory builds on the premise of infinite consumption, which comes from the assumptions of infinite population growth and infinite personal consumption.

Infinite population growth is observed to be false. Population is decreasing in most industrialized nations, and US population would be decreasing if it were not for immigration. Even with immigration, the growth rate is almost negative right now and is expected to be negative very soon.

Infinite individual consumption is also observed to be false on the average. When people reach a certain level of comfort, their needs are met and they have no need to consume ever more resources. Individuals won't eat an infinite amount of food if given the chance, won't use an infinite amount of electricity, or buy an infinitely large house. Once their needs are met, consumption levels off.

The upshot is that we have either reached, or are very close to, the level where all production can be satisfied by fewer workers than exist in the population.

This is the difference, this is how the context has changed from the Luddites in the early 1800's. In all previous examples, there was enough demand for production that people could find work in other areas. This time it's different.

We have an ever-growing number of people who are no longer needed to work.

OK, a reasonable point, but what do you suggest? Stop economic progress, the growth in productivity (if we could)? Should we have stopped in 1950? 1920? How would you and I be communicating?

Here's a well-written example of a possible alternate system.

Check it out - it's an easy read, and gives a good introduction from which we can have informed discussion.

To summarize that position, let's take the current economic growth to it's logical conclusion. Imagine a large factory sitting in Arizona which is responsible for producing all consumables needed by the population. It's completely self contained: solar powered, part of its production is diverted to producing replacement solar panels as they wear out. It recycles waste into new products. It's so completely automated that the number of people needed to run the place is negligible.

Everyone in the US is assigned a fixed portion of the factory output in the form of a monthly allowance - say, $1000 worth of production. Each month people order what they need, the factory makes it and has it delivered to the doorstep. 'Sort of like online grocery shopping.

There is no physical reason preventing such a plant; furthermore, there is no physical reason why the plant couldn't divert some of it's production to duplicating itself, so that over time production would double, and then double again.

This is a nice model with no logical inconsistencies that anyone can see, and it's predicted to be the endpoint of our economic development.

No one knows how we transition from the current system to the global factory model yet.

very cool to see more empirical work on this!

I used the basic resonance model to figure this out for humans.. seems to work well:

    https://sites.google.com/site/pablomayrgundter/mind

Cheers,
Pablo

How can pseudonymity â" one of the key foundations of early internet communities â" be saved?"

No it wasn't one of the key foundations of early internet communities. Quite the opposite in fact - it was seen as a great threat to Internet communities. Lemme cut and paste a post I made last year...

Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug which needed to be fixed. (Also notice that all the people in those old USENET posts are using their real names.) This system was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into chaos and rampant misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.

There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life on the Internet. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, ostensibly so family members sharing a single AOL account could each have their own ID. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly used to make pseudonyms by people wishing to post things online anonymously, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.

All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the away from complete anonymity as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms. The people at the pro-anonymity extreme won't like it, just like the people at the pro-real-name extreme didn't like it in the early 1990s. But as with most things in life the best balance is probably somewhere in between.

Google model of keeping the data in house and doing the targeting themselves

FYI: You guys share Google Analytics data with "others" (Whoever pays Google I guess) after supposedly anonymizing it. I wonder how many people are actually aware of it. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397?hl=en

Because I have done the research and have not found one.

Is that research as in Research, or research as in Googling?

Fingerprint Image data is stored as a raw image (compatible with ISO/IEC 19794-4:2005(E))

Captures an un-distorted raw fingerprint image into PC in 100ms

Just because there is a way something should be done, doesn't mean everyone's going to do it that way.

http://scholar.google.com/

Would Google count as "big money"?

Try the translated page

where is the public API for Google+?

Right here: https://developers.google.com/+/api/

Perhaps you have a different meaning of "public" than I do.

... it bore very little resemblance to current CO2-based AGW theory, which is only a few decades old at most.

Please define "a few decades" so we know if you're talking about research performed in the 1930's, 1950's, or more recently.

Fourier considered convection, which is notably absent from significant mention in the majority of current climate models.

Citation?

You're missing the point. A lot of this was unintentional. They made the USPTO run on fees that were charged for patents which gave the USPTO and incentive to rubber stamp patents while not receiving sufficient funding to cover the cost of having patent examiners that could do the investigation that they used to do.

I'd like to think that this mess is unintentional. But many of the recent changes to the USPTO appear to have optimized it to create lots of poor quality patents. I believe that we could reverse these changes. But, we would need to muster the political will to admit we have made mistakes. I have listed some of these obvious structural problems at: https://plus.google.com/b/101806809558932714222/101806809558932714222/about

I believe that the most serious problems with the structure of the USPTO are:

• 1) More patents are not better than fewer patents. Patents are not Innovation. Patents are not Progress. Patents are simply grounds to file a lawsuit against an industry. More Patents are simply more grounds for more lawsuits. An occasional lawsuit might spur innovation. BUT LAWSUITS DO NOT PRODUCE. Lawsuits are parasitic on innovation and production. Reform must recognize that patents are dangerous monopolies. Reform must place hard limits on the number of patents.
• 2) Running the US Patent Office as a cost-recovery operation is a mistake. The US Patent Office is a very small, but critical component of the US economy. It's purpose was "..to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.." (US Constitution Article One, Section 8(8).) But, once the USPTO started to become completely cost recovery, (See: Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Title X, Subtitle B), that primary goal became overshadowed by the more pressing goal of securing funding via patent fees. The primary effect of cost recovery has been to promote the collection of patent fees. Reform is painful, but simple. Admit cost recovery is a failed experiment. Revert the funding model to the model used for the first 200 years. The USPTO must be centrally funded by the US government. Any collected fees should be returned to the US Government.
• 3) It is a mistake to organize the US Patent Office to create economic incentives to grant poor patents. Currently most of the revenue of the US Patent Office comes from GRANTING patents. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget page 37: www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy13pbr.pdf "..More than half of all patent fee collections are from issue and maintenance fees, which essentially subsidize examination activities." A recent study by the Richmond School of Law found that the USPTO's actual grant rate is currently running at about 89%. In 2001, it was as high as 99%. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2225781 page 9. In 2001, it didn't matter if an application was overbroad, obvious, trivial, a duplicate, or unreasonable, they ALL got granted. Things haven't improved much since then. Reform could come in many forms, but the simplest and most reliable would be to eliminate and unify the Patent office fees into a single filing fee. This fee would provide no guarantee of receiving a patent, only a guarantee that your patent would be considered. This would free the Patent Office to be able to deny poor patents. The filing fee should be high enough to discourage spurious patent applications.
• 4) Scaling up the Patent Office to produce more poor quality patents is a mistake. Currently, we expand the number of patent examiners based on demand. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget, page 60, Gap Assessment: "Meeting this commitment assumes efficiency improvements brought about by reengineering many USPTO management and operational processes (e.g., the patent examination process) and systems, and hiring about 3,00

competition keeps Google behaving ethically because it believes there are benefits to be had.

perhaps it's the fact that they started the company under the mantra of "don't be evil." come on, Microsoft had to compete when it started out and they did a lot of douchebag things. remember how windows 3.1 wouldnt run on DR-DOS because MS sabotaged it.

David Cole and Phil Barrett exchanged emails on 30 September 1991: " "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'"

so dont tell me that competition keeps businesses honest because it's the biggest load of bullshit i've heard in a long time. there is plenty of competition in the tech market and everyone seems to be going with the sue the competition into oblivion form of competition. microsoft has their smartphone OS but everyone is using Android so they decided to extort money from everyone.

Google is honest because it was the plan from the very start.

Google as an ISP?

https://fiber.google.com/about/

and this which is /. reported.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/13/2148245/eff-slams-google-fiber-for-banning-servers-on-its-network

Ya, I've seen this kind of troll before..

Most of his argument is that the UI is different. It's like saying that if you don't have a Gnome/KDE/Unity UI, you're not running Linux..

As a sysadmin, when I'm in a shell on Android, I see Linux. When I'm in a shell on a Mac, I see a Unix. When I open a cmd.exe window on Windows, I see Windows.

I was having some fun with some of my older Android phones a couple weeks ago. I put Dropbear Server II on. I had 4 shells open to 4 phones. I was remounting filesystems, moving files, using wget to collect stuff from my server, installpkg packages (with pm), chmod'ing files, and rebooting as I saw fit. It's just another *nix, and by his own admission a barely modified Linux kernel...

If it looks like a bear, and acts like a bear, and everything else says it's a bear, it must be a spherical chicken in a vacuum.

No, you meant deprecate. Two different words with two different meanings.

Actually, depreciate and deprecate both have 2 meanings, one of which is the definition of the other.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&ie=UTF-8&source=android-browser&q=depreciate
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&ie=UTF-8&source=android-browser&q=deprecate

No, you meant deprecate. Two different words with two different meanings.

Actually, depreciate and deprecate both have 2 meanings, one of which is the definition of the other.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&ie=UTF-8&source=android-browser&q=depreciate
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&ie=UTF-8&source=android-browser&q=deprecate

I think the format's failure was more to do with the fact that the mainstream Video 2000 sets didn't have AV inputs and outputs, that the early units suffered from audio synchronisation incompatibilities between different manufacturers, and (most importantly) the format arrived years later in an already established market. They didn't just have to compete with the other formats, they had to supplant them; which is a much harder job.

Also, I have never seen any evidence that any video format required the approval of the manufacturer before you could sell tapes using that format. In fact I think the idea that adult content was banned was an extension of the earlier urban myth that it was the porn industry's selection of VHS that drove the success of that format, which ignores all the mainstream reasons for the success of VHS: tape length and cheaper recorders.

All this ignores the fact that porn was actually available on Betamax format even in the early days. Look around now. Virtually any format that can show even the lowest resolution of pictures gets used by the porn industry. They would not (and did not) exclusively choose one format of tape and ignore another potential market.

https://www.google.com/search?q=70kg+*+c^2 Since matter is being converted into energy, E=mc^2 So for a 70kg human that works out to 6E18 Joules.

It is as much a part of the history here as anything else.

For added emphasis on ubiquity:

https://www.google.com/search?q=disguised+cell+towers&btnG=Search&client=firefox-a&hs=v3H&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tbm=isch

and...

https://www.google.com/search?q=flagpole+cell+towers&btnG=Search&client=firefox-a&hs=v3H&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tbm=isch

Read some of the articles attached to the images...everywhere.

For added emphasis on ubiquity:

https://www.google.com/search?q=disguised+cell+towers&btnG=Search&client=firefox-a&hs=v3H&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tbm=isch

and...

https://www.google.com/search?q=flagpole+cell+towers&btnG=Search&client=firefox-a&hs=v3H&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tbm=isch

Read some of the articles attached to the images...everywhere.

Whoosh.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/linux.dev.kernel/2OEgUvDbNbo/bTk-VE1zrnYJ

Yes, yes indeed. I just got mine last week!

Am I going to look at those patent numbers? No ! I don't want to get get a migraine headache since many modern IT patents are written in "legalese" such that someone with a Professional Engineering (yes a real one) background who is actually conversant with the field has a hard time understanding the words. Of course the opposite applies since most legal people can understand the words but not the context.

Considering that most PEs are civil engineers and that while EE is a valid discipline for the PE, they tend to be electrical system designers, I'm not sure why you think that that's a helpful background here. For example, very few IT people are PEs, simply because (a) it doesn't apply; and (b) they can't hack the necessary math and physics. Additionally, while most legal people are not conversant in technology, all patent attorneys are - the proper scientific or engineering background is a requirement to sit for the patent bar exam.

I particularly like fig 1c which basically a stylised drawing of the USA (well worth the LOL look) - see here and click on fig "1c" of Images which is the second image from the left.

Not sure why you think that's lol-worthy. The patent describes a system for self-healing networks such as the nationwide telecommunications backbones that go from major city to major city... Accordingly, any geographical network diagram of an example network will inevitably look like the country it's using for the example. Are you suuuure you're a PE?

And you can program them on the phone. Not as easy to build that into apps, though: https://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

No, that patent is pretty clearly for Velcro, even if it is a crappy hard to produce kind. The figure is a cross-section, and in the text it makes it clear it is a 2D fabric, not something like a bra closure. A US trademark was even filled for the name in 1957. You can find evidence of it being used in a fashion show before it was used in space travel related uses, as the inventor struggled to make it fashionable.

"In fact, all of the claims and all of the patents are directed at a communications network, not the particular switching nodes that are manufactured by Cisco and the other companies that are subject of our claims,"

If you read that as is without any a deeper explanation I get the idea that TR Labs can sue anyone who has a communications network.

Again from TFA:

The patents TR Labs is asserting are U.S. Patent Numbers 4,956,835; 5,850,505; 6,377,543; 6,404,734; 6,421,349; 6,654,379; 6,914,880; and 7,260,059.

Am I going to look at those patent numbers? No ! I don't want to get get a migraine headache since many modern IT patents are written in "legalese" such that someone with a Professional Engineering (yes a real one) background who is actually conversant with the field has a hard time understanding the words. Of course the opposite applies since most legal people can understand the words but not the context.

Ok I did look at patent 4,956,835 and it was just like I thought it would be which is basically an implementation and still requires hardware which manufacturers like Cisco provide. The following is an intro:

The present invention relates, in general, to a method and apparatus for rapidly effecting, in a communications network, the restoration of communications between nodes whose interconnecting spans have failed for one reason or another.

I particularly like fig 1c which basically a stylised drawing of the USA (well worth the LOL look) - see here and click on fig "1c" of Images which is the second image from the left.

2013 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Photos from the peanut gallery.

But there should be no retroactive guilt or liability on my part, as there was no documented proof it was harmful before testing it.

Most countries don't make people criminals before they actually commit the crime in question. So this concern is probably trivially satisfied by whatever district you are in.

"Lets face it, security and privacy were not designed into the protocols we use on the internet today, they were bolted on afterward, and the government played a big (and self serving) part of that effort."

For those that doubt that statement, please read the documentation provided by the none other than the NSA itself.

http://www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/suiteb_cryptography/

That page was posted by the NSA 4 1/2 years ago and updated in May 2013. Surprisingly, they name names--exactly who worked on what--and even go so far as to provide addresses and personal information for these people. These names can be used to locate networks of "cooperation", just like the NSA uses metadata to find out things about us. For instance, one of the key writers in this document ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6318.txt?number=6318 ) when Googled is linked to this document-- https://www.google.com/patents/US6243467 , which in turn adds more names. Follow the names, and see just how much trust you have afterwards.

Dig through the links! Very informative! Start asking yourself what crypto might be safe from the NSA, and you'll quickly realize--the further you dig--that none of it is safe from the NSA. They've identified and created "secure" versions of almost every protocol, for themselves (Suite B), and stuck the rest of the world with lesser versions, versions that would obviously be crackable given that they possess something better.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised that page is still available. I suspect it won't be for long.

While I hate ads myself and remove them in my own method from FB, if everyone used these types of mods then FB would have no way of making money off advertisments. That's what they are trying to prevent. I myself use Stylish and just make my own small CSS changes. Below is what I put together. All it does is hide a few page elements such as ads.

ul.fbChatOrderedList > li:not(.active):not(.mobile), ._uiStreamStoryAttachmentOnly, .fbTimelineSideAds,
#pagelet_ego_pane_w,
#pagelet_ego_pane
{
    display: none !important;
}

Use the HTML interface plus the Better Gmail FF extension..

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h

Apple built the fingerprint reader right into a button that a user can't avoid pressing simply to use this device. So even if a user doesn't want to use the fingerprint feature, doesn't want their computer to be able to scan their fingerprint, it can. We know that the NSA can spy on data from smart phones, and we know that the NSA is sharing data they collect with law-enforcement agencies---law enforcement agencies that maintain massive fingerprint databases on everyone they can.

Go ahead and call it paranoid. All of the above stories would've been dismissed as paranoid two years ago, too.