Slashdot Mirror

Actually, no. Twitter has protected tweets which are viewable only by approved followers, as well as direct messages viewable only by sender and recipient. There are, in fact, people who use Twitter without posting any public messages at all.

I don't really understand what point you were trying to make with this public/private distinction, but I thought I'd correct the factual error.

Except Google itself apparently has an official corporate Twitter account that's active and has 5.4+ million followers ("Verified Profile"). BTW, Apple also has an official YouTube Channel despite Steve Jobs' feelings towards Google.

https://twitter.com/dronestream

When I hear that copyright enforcers are going after a little player like TekSavvy, I can't help but wonder if the larger ISP's are in collusion.

I'm guessing you didn't pay attention to the CRTC proceedings for the last few years on things like GAS, speed matching and throttling. There was a huge pile of crap on it all, quite a few people have been fighting against it and the closed-backdoor crap from the incumbents. JF Mezi for example has done quite a bit of work on all this.

the days of iPhone exclusives are long over.

Correct. Nowadays, an app will be ported to iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. Tiny Wings is not for Android.

I've seen how Apple treats its customers who bought its DRM ridden MP3's at 128...they have to pay a premium.

No, that's how the major record labels treat their customers.

A quick Google reveals that FreeBSD's "Year-End Fundraising Campaign" was only recently announced, on December 5th. So, naturally, they won't be all that close to their goal by December 9th.

Maybe the GCSB will say their methods are secret and can't be disclosed in open court, and the court will dismiss the charges against Dotcom, giving the government a way out. It's happened in the US a few times.

This is not a case that can be dismissed. He is fighting extradition to the US. Either he wins and stays in NZ, or he loses and gets on a plane to America.

It should be noted that Mr. Dotcom was more or less done for until he hired an American law firm to represent him; his new legal team is lead by one of President Obama's law school classmates. That firm, of course, also represents Google and almost every Android phone manufacturer against Apple and Microsoft.

A look at the twitter feed of the submitter and his associated web site--"Farlight Elite Hackers Legacy"--does not give the impression of responsible disclosure. But this is the same guy who released the 2010 “Apache Killer”; calling attention to problems with exploit code is this guy's method. I'd rather see that than no disclosure at all. He does appear to be a professional penetration tester at work, who does things like speak at conferences on his methods too.

For Syrian users: Internet dialup access: +31205350535 user: xs4all password: xs4all (https://twitter.com/xs4all/status/274635064212598784)

If that's the case I can only find 1 complaint on twitter: https://twitter.com/lorissantamaria/status/272454085700112384. Hardly "spreading the word". This Slashdot article does more to call attention to it than the tweet in question.

For groups designated as terrorist organization, "free speech" doesn't apply. It is illegal to provide a channel for such groups to communicate.

Putting aside legal standards for a minute, this strikes me as foolish and wrong. Free speech isn't just a fundamental right, it's also a good idea. Terrorist organizations should be able to get their messages out: how else are we going to provide a counterpoint to it?

I remember hearing that the Taliban's reps at the UN started giving out translations of the Taliban's decrees and teachings. They became quite popular, the spokesmen were pleasantly surprised that their message was catching on... until they found out that the other UN delegates were wanting them because of how utterly ridiculous they were. For instance, the Taliban had several lessons on proper sexual conduct with farm animals. It went something like Q: is it okay to have sex with a chicken? A:Yes, but you must own the chicken and then kill the chicken. Q: Can I then eat the chicken? A: No. But you may give the killed chicken to a neighbor for him to eat.

The taliban stopped distributing their propaganda to the UN at that point.

For instance, when they tweet "#Palestinian youth managed to reach the barrier and take pictures of the bombed #Israeli army jeep. #Gaza #GazaVictory," I can ask why it is Hamas thinks that kids taking pictures of a bombed jeep counts as "#GazaVictory?" If that blurry cameraphone picture counts as a victory, Israel really should worry about Hamas getting a DLSR. If those kids had instagram on that phone, maybe Hamas could have taken back Jerusalem by now!

I don't think that mocking probably convinced anyone that Hamas was stupid, but you never know. And again, terrorist organizations are going to get their messages out anyway, if they're open, at least we can try to counter it.

"When I type amazon.com into a web browser, it assumes I mean www.amazon.com."

No, it doesn't. It goes out to DNS to resolve "amazon.com," and the returned record point to the hosts 72.21.211.176, 72.21.194.1, and 72.21.214.128. Your browser then attempts to do an http get from one of those hosts, and is immediately redirected to www.amazon.com. It's Amazon which is changing it to www.amazon.com, not your browser. Many/most sites do that.

Prove it to yourself - https://twitter.com/ connects, no www.

Here is his twitter feed. Much to nobody's surprise, it's in Korean.

The "100%" comes from a tweet by Peter R de Vries, a crime reporter. The spokeswoman for the institute that did the actual DNA matching (NFI) said there is no such thing as 100% certainty. (both links are in Dutch)

The brief has been pulled from the RSC website. It's as good a guess as any that it was pulled so fast because someone at the MPAA or RIAA put the kibosh on this. Copies of it still circulate about the internet.

The original brief was written by congressional staffer, a young guy by the name of Derek Khanna. It seems it was not a committee-wide document. Khanna continues a discussion on the matter over at Reddit. I should imagine by now that Khanna has his balls in a vice for this embarrassment.

If you're the kind of person who regularly complains about IP laws, but would rather do something about it, write Khanna a note of support by email or twitter. That doesn't mean you have to agree completely with the brief or other things Khanna has to say. It just gives him the ammunition to say that copyright reform is a good direction for the GOP and that his writing about it was not a mistake. As daemonenwind notes about, the GOP, particularly the younger elements of it, is now taking a hard look at its platform. You may be rather jaded, as I am, and believe that the old neo-con guard is likely to carry the day. They are. But if there's any hope of changing the discourse on this it will be at a time right now, when the older ways of the GOP have received electoral repudiation that a flood of cash couldn't stop. The promise of real electoral support that could come from a pro-reform platform will be particularly attractive now, especially if they get the sense that those under 35 care about this.

I would think the first amendment would protect the poster.

Normally, yes, but in the case that the speaker is knowingly putting the life of others in danger, not so much.

Okay but, doesn't calling for an assassination constitute a threat to the POTUS' life?

Yes, and every threat will be investigated by the Secret Service.

Of course, we must all keep in mind that saying "I hope someone kills that guy" is not the same thing as saying "I'm gonna kill that guy." Only the latter can be construed as an actionable threat.

The person running the blog in question is, apparently, incapable making that distinction, based on his inclusion of the post from Doug Jarrett


Make no mistake, this (ironically, still anonymous) individual has absolutely zero interest in outing actual racists; rather, his intent is, IMO, inciting violence against his perceived political opposition, which is definitely not a protected form of speech.

His Twitter: https://twitter.com/MrADeveci He's claiming misunderstanding. Anyone buy it? Anyone?

Thank you for your concern. At at&t(R), our commitment(tm) to rebuilding the nation's largest 4G network this year with your input has not wavered. However, our cozy government relationship requires us to install multiple backdoors, electronic and otherwise, and our Security budget was beginning to cut into our Invite Government Representatives Into Boardroom For Lobbying And Slash Or Trophywife Swapping budget.

As such, we have decided to retain the mandatory backdoors but leave them open to these minor vulnerabilities. The occasional permanent loss of an antenna, your Facebook account's integrity, or that one guy in Customer Service who decides to blow a whistle on us does not preclude your required payment of the 2012 Nation's Largest 4G Network Improvements Fee, or the upcoming 2013 Nation's Largest 4G Network Improvements Fee (which we hereby announce in this sentence, as double the 2012 version in all cases), even though both would be entirely too small to buy such high-value targets and high-class lays in such high volume.

Thank you again for choosing at&t(R), now with the nation's tallest paperweights. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or let us track you to your house through any other method imaginable.

Remember Charlie Miller, the hacker Apple hates so much he was banned for a year from the App Store? Google barred his wife from an Google Play Store developer account because "I got banned for being 'associated' with @jonoberheide. My wife got banned for associating with me."

Just yours.
Top ten states by % of college graduates - all democrats
Bottom ten states by % of college graduates - 9 were republican

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/266758023177981952/photo/1

You can see all the companies she worked for here.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/estherschindler

https://twitter.com/estherschindler

Yes, only squeaked by. Almost 120 million people voted. If around 130,000 of those - ~50K in VA, ~55K in OH, and ~25K in Florida - had switched to Romney, the outcome would have been a Romney presidency. That's less than 1.5% of VA, less than 1.1% of OH, less than 0.4% of FL, and less than 0.011% of the national vote.

Nate Silver tried hard to correct your misconception:

IMPORTANT: That we have Obama as a ~90% favorite does NOT mean we're predicting a landslide. We expect a close election.

And a close election is what we had. That the outcome could be predicted with fairly good certainty doesn't mean it wasn't close.

FTA:

“He played around with the field a little and realized that in order to vote for Romney, his finger had to be exactly on the mark,” Nancy wrote in an email. She said “the invisible Obama field came down about 1/4 [of an inch]” into what should technically have been the Romney area.

I can vote for Invisible Obama?

Yep these were the scenes of chaos outside Apple store Covent Garden this morning: https://twitter.com/mmalex/status/264296937665212417/photo/1/large

source: http://twitter.com/linode

Let's hope power is restored soon...

https://twitter.com/USPirates

Callcentric apparently had a single datacenter in NYC with no backup power generator. Lots of discussion here.

Callcentric has no backup power, so their phone service is down nationwide.

Thanks for injecting some common sense. Slashdotters usually like to sneer at the masses and call it "common sense", but in this case common sense means being prepared.

The sheer extent of the storm will mean a massive impact. Emergency responders can only work as fast as they can work. The expected number of power outages will mean that linesmen just can't fix them all in a timely manner.

Philadelphia International Airport has shut down. PHL is the 12th busiest airport in the world. That's a simply huge impact considering the number of people who would ordinarily pass through the area on a given weekday, and the financial losses. It's not a decision they'd make lightly (and an airport has their own very sophisticated weather monitoring and analysis stations).

Margate, NJ, was already flooded this morning, and the storm has barely even started. It's both massive and slow moving, so it'll be hanging around for ages as it's dumping rain on us.

Here's Red Hook, Brooklyn, and that's just the beginning.

Here's more, courtesy of NY Times. They've opened their paywall. Scroll down and have a look at the pictures and remember it's barely started yet.

I agree... we should let corporations tell us when weather is bad.
Because paying for information to be told a tornado is coming is a good idea.
Paying to be told a hurricane is coming is a good idea.
Preventing loss of life should be secondary to profits.
Also, none of that is bribing to save lives, its just good business.

If only we were less short sighted than profits and more caring about people. But fuck it, PROFITS!

Not that I want to get in the way of a rant with momentum (+5? Really?), but you do realize that at present the vast majority of people in the United States get their warnings about bad weather, approaching tornados, and hurricanes heading towards shore, from their local television and radio stations? You do realize that the vast majority of them are commercial enterprises? You know: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, the Weather Channel, etc.? You do realize what those organizations are, don't you? They are called "corporations," and I haven't noticed any mass slaughter going on due to lack of warning - quite the opposite. But it gets worse - the satellites that provide the weather information - built by corporations under contract. There is a growing chance that the next weather satellites will be carried into orbit by commercial space lift - rockets owned and operated by corporations. Still worse, the warnings about bad weather are transmitted on commercial equipment, in some cases on commercial communications satellites. The horror! How is it that we manage to avoid daily disaster, given your thinking? Is it possible there is a piece of the puzzle you aren't accounting for? (One piece? More than that I think.)

"Government" is just a word for things we do together. "Corporation" is just a word for things we do together voluntarily. -- David Burgeâ@iowahawkblog

You haven't responded to my request and you have willfully ignored my second sentence.

I'll try to make it more concrete:
You walk to the voting station, wave to the observers and walk another 100 feet.
You ENTER the voting station.
A Republican/Democrat aims an AK47 at you and says: 'Vote X or I will fucking kill you and your entire family. Talk to any observers and I will fucking kill you and your entire family.'
He escorts you to the booth and confirms that you vote X.
You walk out of the voting station, walk 100 feet and wave to the observers again, forcing a smile. They ask you whether everything went ok. "Yeah, just peachy!"

Now you will say that this is hyperbole, and it clearly is. The problem I am trying to illustrate is that international observers are redundant if they have to rely on the accounts of voters (who, for subtle cases may not even realize that they have been influenced). They need to be able to get first-hand evidence and apply their expertise to asserting the fairness of the voting process. That is exactly why the 100ft restrictions are not present for domestic 'watchers' (they are COMPLETELY different from 'pollsters' or 'press').

Now you can continue to be obtuse and pretend that somehow international observers can perform the same task as domestic observers with the 100ft restriction in place or you can wake up and realize that Greg Abbott is a fucking idiot and that refusing international observers says 'corrupt bastard' like nothing else:
http://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/261591085996990464
(Belarus is one of the most corrupt nations of Eurasia, if not the world)

If that doesn't convince you I vehemently urge you to put some effort into the thought exercise of 'ensuring fair elections in Romania' (as in my previous reply). It might open your mind.

First, a question: why should foreign nationals working on behalf of an international organization have more access to proceedings than United States citizens - whether civilian, or state or federal authorities -- are currently allowed by law?

See AC sibling and: http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3207823&cid=41763269
Allowing observers ('watchers') is complete no-brainer for any voting station, as fraud would be way too easy otherwise. It's such a no-brainer that you can find info on it on ehow: http://www.ehow.com/list_6384122_duties-poll-watcher_.html
Is it _really_ that hard to fathom that it makes sense to extend this to international observers of an internationally controlled and vetted organization?
The OCSE observers aren't RPG-wielding Iranians that want to blow up voting stations, you know.

And they are. The extent permitted by Texas State law is "so long as you keep 100' away, just like everyone else doing exit polls, campaigning for specific candidates/propositions/constitutional ammendments, and and anyone else who might influence the election by mere proximity.

You mean do the things that are explicitly excluded from the international agreement?: "Such observers will undertake not to interfere in the electoral proceedings."

The United states is endeavoring to the extent they are able.

(1) That doesn't change that disallowing international observers is still a third world country-style anti-democratic dickish thing to do.

As a matter of Constitutional law, there' not much more they can do. Federal election laws do not provide for strong federal oversight of state elections.

I've seen comments saying otherwise, but I do not know enough about the technicalities of the legal relation between the US federation and the states themselves. Nor do I care. See (1).

The issue the OSCE complains of in the linked document amounts to saying, "the United States is not organized like other countries, and that's a nuisance for us from a regulatory perspective."

You lie or have misunderstood. Read it again (hell, try reading TFS). Hint: there are quite a number of people in the US with similar concerns regarding some of the recently instated voting regulations.

The OSCE could always try to sue in federal court if they feel the law is in error.

Yes, I'm sure that's a case that will be dealt with within three weeks. Thank you for suggesting this very effective and realistic option.

So far, they have not done so. So far, this comment from Abbot is little different from the AG pre-emptivly reminding any group to obey the law, and there will be no special treatment. No different that a protestor rally.

A 'protestor rally'? Really?? That's what you compare international observers to?
And 'pre-emptivly [sic] reminding'? Have you read his tweet (in TFA)?
"UN poll watchers can't interfere w/ Texas elections,” he tweeted. “I'll bring criminal charges if needed. Official letter posted soon. #comeandtakeit"

This guy is a fucking joke ( http://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX ):
"Even Belarus denied Visas to European Vote Monitors. Why should they be allowed here? http://www.rferl.org/content/belarus-denies-osce-monitors-visas/24713858.html"
Belarus is one of the most corrupt nations in Eurasia and considered a dictatorship by many - which kind of proves my fucking point - See (1).

Seriously, it never ceases to amaze me how stupid some of the highly placed officials in the US are. How the fuck does an asshole like this become an Attorney General?

Ceefax news came from the BBC and could be believed. The brainless mind wank that comprises most of twitter is just digital wallpaper.

https://twitter.com/BBCNews

What surprises me about this story is that the account termination results in wiping of her Kindle.

They did not wipe her Kindle. That was a misunderstanding in TFA.

https://twitter.com/webmink/statuses/260432600814981120
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.digi.no%2F904658%2Fhun-ble-kastet-ut-av-amazon

We're stuck here for good, destined to just keep looking at extra solar planets via telescope and speculating about whether they could support life as we know it. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light years away. The farthest man made object is just roughly 17 light hours from home after 35 years of travel; so forget about sending spaceships physically to the stars unless someone invents warp drive. It's laughable to talk of Alpha Centauri when no one in power is showing interest in returning to the moon, let alone Mars.
And leaving aside that, we're stuck with the reality of NASA facing budget cuts despite its overall budget being a drop in the ocean compared to what's been spent on war in the last 10 years.
Space exploration should've been incremental, start with a lunar refuelling base at the pole where there's water ice that can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, and use that as a staging area for further exploration. Build a spacecraft for travelling to Mars in LEO stage by stage, and send a bunch of robots to assemble a modular base well before the first humans are sent (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series describes this approach).

While Curiosity, Opportunity & Spirit are testimony to NASA's engineering prowess, it still can't beat an actual geologist (areologist?) on Mars with a field laboratory who's able to directly analyse rocks and figure out what it was like in the past.

Want some perspective? Just the annual airconditioning budget for the US Army in Iraq/Afghanistan far exceeds that of NASA's.

Yeah, quoting one twitter account doesn't really show much more than a segment of "Anonymous"'s opinion. They have quite a few. Tweet from the last one: "Anonymous not unanimous. We don't have to agree w/ each other all the time. We choose to take part in actions we support, or not. #Wikileaks".

Yeah, quoting one twitter account doesn't really show much more than a segment of "Anonymous"'s opinion. They have quite a few. Tweet from the last one: "Anonymous not unanimous. We don't have to agree w/ each other all the time. We choose to take part in actions we support, or not. #Wikileaks".

Yeah, quoting one twitter account doesn't really show much more than a segment of "Anonymous"'s opinion. They have quite a few. Tweet from the last one: "Anonymous not unanimous. We don't have to agree w/ each other all the time. We choose to take part in actions we support, or not. #Wikileaks".

Yeah, quoting one twitter account doesn't really show much more than a segment of "Anonymous"'s opinion. They have quite a few. Tweet from the last one: "Anonymous not unanimous. We don't have to agree w/ each other all the time. We choose to take part in actions we support, or not. #Wikileaks".

Yeah, quoting one twitter account doesn't really show much more than a segment of "Anonymous"'s opinion. They have quite a few. Tweet from the last one: "Anonymous not unanimous. We don't have to agree w/ each other all the time. We choose to take part in actions we support, or not. #Wikileaks".

We have two stacks; one serves internal users and one serves external.

We've found it handy to push to the "stage" stack on Thursday, let it bake Friday + the weekend + Monday, and then push to production on Tuesday if there's no problems.

We keep track of anything that would affect a potential rollback. If there's a database migration, we back up the database before going live. Simple, easy, effective. And despite what James may say, rollback does exist. Not that we've had to do it more than once or twice.

We would push more frequently except we're too busy changing the world.

Or how about the fact that they promote their non existent twitter profile on their main page:

https://twitter.com/revere_group

The internal rocket systems have also improved considerably, since the Falcon rockets use TCP/IP for internal commands along with the dozens of cameras mounted inside of the vehicle. I loved the live dual views of the 1st stage separation event from both the 1st and 2nd stages at the same time... together with 2nd stage ignition. That simply wasn't even possible in the Apollo days.

I love this photo though in terms of putting things into perspective: https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/255106389683343360/photo/1

I really wish people would stop focusing on the iOS 6 Maps fiasco. It's getting old.

Plus, it's distracting from things like:

* The music app is now buggy as all hell. I've had it play one song while saying it's playing another song. Not to mention it randomly forgetting where in a playlist it was, pausing randomly skipping back to the beginning of the song, and other general wonkiness.
* If you had paused a podcast and receive a call, hanging up the call will suddenly start the podcast playing again. Surprise!
* The podcast app can't update podcasts. You can tell it to - but it won't. The only way to get new episodes is to sync with iTunes.
* Photo syncing is just hilariously broken. Rather than replacing existing photos, iTunes will just copy a new set on, leaving you with all the old photos as permanent "extra" storage. Solution: Do a factory reset. Hope you don't need any of your *other* data!
* Just try and set an alarm to 2 o'clock.
* Battery life is worse.
* Apps are just generally slower - animation is noticeably "jerkier" in iOS 6.

And I'm sure other iOS 6 users can expand on this. iOS 6 is just laughably bad - even if you completely ignore the maps!

China is just for R HQ is in finland
https://twitter.com/JollaMobile/status/253408126420779008

Relevant Twitter bot: https://twitter.com/StealthMountain

You can do much the same stuff with just an Arduino. No fancy graphs, but it does Tweet. https://twitter.com/fermtherm

some cable ISPs here are known for unthrottling connections as soon as the URL includes something like /speedtest/ - e.g. NetCologne

... If you were hoping for $100 and a couple hours its not quite there yet.

I can recommend starting with using a 3D printing service.
Even if you use a commercial printing service, much of the experience of 3D printing is still there, like the design, the anticipation of outcome, etc.

Google for Sculpteo and Shapeways.
They're pretty affordable, and do a lot of the messy work for you.
I had this printed for 90 bucks or so:
https://twitter.com/i/#!/BramStolk/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter.com%2FJmiojXxJ

Actually, I only emitted the idea as a joke. Not only that, but what they're really talking about is not a futures market for bitcoins as the summary tries to imply, but a futures market for oil and gold in which the transactions are done in bitcoins.

That's hardly the same idea, so I'm not sure if I should be offended that they took my half-baked idiotic idea and tried to implement it, or that I should be offended that they took my half-baked idiotic idea and tried to copy it badly.

Either way, I'd recommend against investing in this market, and as the inventor -- I should really be the one to know.