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If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

Long ago as Napster faded into the sunset (in its old form, at least) a friend turned me onto allofmp3. Promised me it was only $.10 a track and the selection was amazing. I went there, I signed up, I think I even may have purchased a few tracks.

But the more I looked at it, the more uneasy I felt about how legitimate it could be. This latest story confirms my hunch... they aren't. This other related article from Wired goes into further detail. Apparently allofmp3 is already offering downloads for the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers' as are tracks from the latest Shakira album (you can tell I'm from the vinyl age, still calling them "albums"). The prices are 1/10 the iTunes rates, and while the article doesn't say, it would seem allofmp3 has no contract or agreement to sell these tracks.

(From the Wired article: "..., World music downloading leader iTunes charges a fixed 99 cents per song, but the Russian site offers tracks for a 10th of that price. Songs from the Red Hot Chili Peppers' new double album, Stadium Arcadium, cost between 10 and 16 cents. The whole of Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, the latest album by Colombian pop star Shakira, can be had for just $1.40...., ")

I like what allofmp3 has tried to do, offer a vast array of music at much more reasonable prices than the rest of the world, but it does them, and the rest of us who would demand a more fair distribution model irreparable damage. The more "we" are labeled as criminals by our own actions, the more fodder for their argument. And, the more likely DRM becomes more onerous and intrusive and constraining.

Also interesting is the focus of the article, the barrier for Russia to enter into the World Trade Organization. I couldn't care less about that aspect, it seems a big stick and out of proportion that Russia should bear... but that's political schtick. I think the even bigger issue is this has put allofmp3 on everybody's radar, which of course means the RIAA, Congress, progress (i.e., the opposite of congress), etc. And if allofmp3 is selling rogue mp3s, it's bad for the anti-DRM community.

It's an eternal adage, and how true it always seems to be: "If it seems to good to be true, it probably is."

Someone at Wired made that connection, as well. Check it out: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,69900-1.htm l grep for "Lost opens the hatch, finds an Apple II".

Looks like some of the formatting is broken, but it is a good read. (IMHO)

Decently written, and even today somewhat realistic version of what may or may not happen in such a scenario.

As I mentioned -- in the article. I may be shallow, but I try. To wit:

"Restrictions on hands-on chemical experience is 'a problem that has been building for 10 or 15 years, driven by liability and safety concerns,' says John Moore, editor in chief of the JCE."

Actual link to first page here.

Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting piece on why data-mining not only doesn't work, but can't work in the context of finding terrorist plots:

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70357-0.html?t w=wn_story

In a nutshell, his premise is that the underlying assumptions that make data mining work for such things as credit card fraud don't hold when searching for terrorist plots. Also, that trying to apply those models will result in a flurry of false negatives so large as to make the whole effort useless and a waste of resources which could otherwise be better spent. It's hard to argue with...

A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.

Bruce Schneier explained this very well in a recent article...or maybe it was in "Beyond Fear". Probably both. At any rate, his general thinking goes like this: terrorist detection methods are only particularly useful if they generate a low number of false positives and a low number of false negatives.

Hey, I found the article: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70357-1.html


Paragraphs 5, 6, 7, and 8 are the most relevant. So basically, the NSA has built a system that is absolutely unable to do the job that it was designed for (or at least for the job that they are claiming it is designed for). There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA, and no doubt they have arrived at this conclusion on their own. So why are they building this surveillance network then, if they know that it will not work? Since there's no way that they could follow up on all of the leads such a system would generate, there must be some other use for it.

You can't use the system to find the needle in the random, anonymized haystack. But if you have an suspected terrorist, then you have an idea where to start looking. If the CIA or FBI has identified Mohammed Smith as a terrorist, they could use this system to analyze his calling patterns and associations to find other potential terrorists, and analyze those numbers to find other terrorists, etc. By this method they could potentially identify, thwart, and capture the terrorsts threatening the country. Of course, they don't actually need this secret domestic spying system to do this though. If they have identified a suspect then they can get a warrant from a court, or file a FISA letter with the FISA court to get the same information.

There are already appropriate and effective legal channels to obtain the information that this system provides. So why the alternate system? The only answer that remains is that it would be used for purposes outside the scope of the law. An effective use would be to see who has been calling journalists and blowing the whistle on illegeal wiretapping programs. Hmm...

Software, with its millions of lines of code, is so complicated that experts don't know for sure that open source has fewer bugs, nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure.

It's not, at least for the classes of bugs that can be automatically detected.

• The Fuzz test
• Coverity et. al.

Oooh, it has "interactive movies" too... I'm actually salivating, "play an interactive movie: help create characters, shift the story line, change the situation, watch something different happen each time - cable in the VCR and edit your home videos." I'm sure that's going to beat the heck out of playing games! (Note, article is from May/Jun 1993 and titled "3DO: Hip or Hype? Is it the next Apple, Microsoft, and Nintendo rolled into one? Or is it too good to be true? Joe Flower finds out.")

This is not surprising. In many ways, MMOs are the spiritual offspring of the theme park.

What I think is even more interesting is moving in the other direction, theme parks based on popular MMO franchises.

Quest-based, exploration-based, rides and virtual experiences that build upon the familiar geography of popular MMO worlds, with cross-promotions that build the core audience on both sides of the fence.

It's called The Long Tail.

BZZZT!
Quote from the ruling, via Wired:

"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis(m).' The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here."

Even their name's a dime store joke. It's got the first four letters of the work Forgery in it's name. Seriously, what's the follow-up to the to the "Rembrandt found in the attic" analogy. Their "majority of the claims upheald" comment sounds just like Darl's "we are pleased with the numbers comments after each successively worse quarter.

"GameCube" says what it is -- it's a cube that plays games. Pretty straightforward. Good name.

And also incredibly generic and tough to defend as a trademark, especially when your closest competitor uses "box" (meaning an approximate cuboid) in the name of its product. People outside the business find it hard to keep the PS2 generation consoles' names straight.

"Wii" -- what the fuck is that?

And what is a "PS2"? Isn't that pronounced like piss too?

From the CNN article:

USA Today reported that the NSA doesn't record or listen to conversations. Rather, the article said, the agency uses the data -- including phone numbers, times and locations -- to look for patterns that might suggest terrorist activity.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is in conflict with Mark Klein's recent evidence in the separate Hepting vs. AT&T case:

From The documents released by Wired on Monday:

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

To me, this sounded far-fetched. Everything is a lot of stuff.

More background on Hepting vs. AT&T

The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.

I am more impressed with that Montreal kid who did something similiar:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70882-0.htm l?tw=wn_index_12 A 16-year-old high school student has invented a new way of producing electricity by harnessing the brawny power of bacteria.

Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.

"...there IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to produce hydrogen efficiently, from a renewable resource, without leaving toxic byproducts..."
Among the other methods mentioned here, there has been some research done using green algae (aka pond scum) to produce hydrogen...sun, water, algae...sounds pretty renewable to me.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54456, 00.html

The baton houses an antenna that produces microwaves that vary in frequency from 400 MHz to 1,350 MHz. When the microwaves hit a tumor, the tumor resonates at about 400 MHz, producing a signal that interferes with the original signal from the baton. [...] Information on this interference is sent to a computer that uses a set of algorithms to translate the information into a readable image.

Technologies that were formerly infeasible or unreliable frequently take on new life as the sweeping wave of information technology washes by.

Thus, an ancient, esoteric, expensive, and minimally useful technology (rotational spectroscopy) is suddenly viable as a new, privacy-piercing technology.

Which brings me to my point: Are we going to sit back and watch our freedoms erode due to the lack of the basic privacy we've taken for granted for so long, or are we going to restructure our society so that we can preserve our freedoms despite the fact that privacy is dying its last breaths?

Link goes to the most insightful and useful article I've ever seen that illucidates the problem nicely, while providing a solution we can sink our teeth into. If you haven't read it yet, I strongly urge you to do so.

Where the United States goes, I can only guess. But I'm quite sure that the next free society will apply the lessons in the link above.

Maybe a better analog would be:
Carmack is to video games as James Cameron is to cinema.

Not necessarily known for his directing efforts (such as they are) but definitely highly regarded for pioneering technical innovation.

(P.S. Hi John! How pleased are you that Google returns this picture for a search on your name?)

mirror of Mark Klein's ATT/NSA documents:

http://cryptome.org/att_klein_wired.pdf (1.67MB)

Source: http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/att_klein_wired.p df

This is an excellent article that rebuts your argument that is both concise and eloquent: http://wired.com/news/columns/0,70886-0.html?tw=wn _index_23

The shocking thing in this case is not that Wired would leak the evidence, it's what the evidence contains, and the fact that it was kept secret. As the wired article concludes:

"This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!"

I'm sure that liberal and conservative nerds alike can recognize that there ought not to be a splitter on the optic fibers carrying your internet communications, that is monitorable by the NSA without a warrant or oversight.

What's that, the new Just-in-Time bullshit statement delivery system?

And since the PDF download from wired is named att_klein_wired.pdf, I'm guessing you're right.

This gets to the larger issue. As much as I am concerned about spying on Americans, and the mis-deeds of AT&T, I am much more concerned that the administration's actions in putting itself above the law sets a precedence for gross and blatant violation of the law by many. In short, what we have here is the begining of the breakdown of law and order.

That said, how do you fight those who are above the law when you are constrained to play by the rules? Consider that the administration stopped the Justice department investigation into the NSA by refusing to issue clearances to the Justice Department. Any ideas on how to deal with this when the legal system has been co-opted by those who are committing the mis-deeds? Does legality have any meaning in this case?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70944-0.htm l

Full evidence of NSA wiretapping that AT&T has been doing on the entire US portion of Internet since 2003, with documents and stuff. This is going to become big news today. I'll be disappointed in the US if public outcry fails to shut this Big Brother stuff down.

Here is the link to the leaked AT&T Court documents that were released on Wired this morning:

http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/att_klein_wired.p df

Today, Wired published the full evidence of the AT&T/NSA domestic surveillance program. It is fascinating reading:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70944-0.htm l

Who plagerised who? http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70952-0.ht ml?tw=rss.index/

[My music is] definitely not public domain. I have a publisher and I make money from the publishing of the songs. That's a big part of an income, so I'm not going to pretend that I'm that socialistic about my music. But I'm not so possessive about it that I would sue anyone who misused it. If someone were to sample my work, I would have a hard time seeking payment for that. I don't even have a problem with people illegally downloading that stuff.[emphasis mine]

Note to self. RTFWSTFBR

As pentenance I provide the following links
http://www.digg.com/apple/Carpenter_s_level_Widget _-_Uses_your_Powerbook_s_motion_detector
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66936,00.html

Bert
(Read the WHOLE f*** slashdot thread first before replying)

So lots of people are saying how bad this is.

If you're expecting another episode of desperate housewives, then yes, you would think it was awful.

I thought it was fantastic. it was rich with symbols. more than anything else, I saw the two characters as a representation of different forces both inside people's heads and in , more broadly, forces moving in the world.

Emo - a short for "emotion" represents the feeling (right brain) activities. Proog is the logical, thinking angle - his actions have (up to now) created most of the structure around them (much as the NT types have structured the real world as logical-only wins). There is distinct symbolism throughout that the two exist within a "machine" that resembles many features of what it might look like inside someone's head. Both characters create the machine around them. Proog keeps referring to left and right - the sides of the brain. Proog is desperately trying to convince the young, emerging emotional side that the world he has created is "safe" but all evidence shows us it's not at all safe. Emo seems like he's been abused, kept down by Proog.

Proog is scared of what Emo has and can do. Proog is simultaneously trying to control what Emo sees and what he believes, but also has distinct interest. Emo shows us that he has far more power than Proog to "create" the world they are in, and Proog swiftly knocks him out again.

This whole story is a reflection of what is going on in the world today. Read, for example this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain.htm l

Part of the issue with the Slashdot crowd is that mostly you are "T" oriented, so you won't "get" this it at all.

This is the story of the emergence of the power of the NF, and the efforts of the NT to control and prevent it. It's a loosing battle folks.

I guess ZFone is right out then. Dynamic encryption key set up by using Diffie-Helman on a call by call basis with an unknown peer using no pre-shared key (PSK). A dynamic way to make VOIP untappable. Even with the incredible tools that the NSA uses from Narus Networks and optical splitters to assemble profiles on every conversation and protocol used by a given source IP address. (The Narus tools used by the NSA can decode all major codecs). Assume your Vonage calls are on a hard drive somewhere.

One of these days, some asshole is going to take down the entire net, just to prove that it can be done.

I keep thinking about the old saying, "what isn't prohibited, is required." Because the net doesn't prohibit these massive DDoS attacks, someone WILL do them, over and over, either because they are into extortion, or just because they're evil fucks and like creating mayhem. I almost believe that someone ought to just do it and break the net permanently so everyone will have to come to grips with this. So maybe the solution will mean that nobody with an insecure OS will be allowed back on the net. Maybe we need a catastrophic failure to force a total revamp of network protocols, and an excuse to exile all the lusers like people still using Win98. I dunno, it would probably be faster, cheaper, and ultimately more satisfying if we could just assassinate spamming assholes like PharmaMaster/Eran Reshef.

China Threatens Inda Eminence

Another "Cut-In and Test Procedure" document dated January 24, 2003, provides diagrams of how AT&T Core Network circuits were to be run through the "splitter" cabinet (PDF 7). One page lists the circuit IDs of key Peering Links which were "cut-in" in February 2003 (PDF 8), including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West. By the way, Mae West is one of two key internet nodal points in the United States (the other, Mae East, is in Vienna, Virginia). It's not just WorldNet customers who are being spied on -- it's the entire internet.

According to this PDF document, they're running the Narus software on a Sun Fire V880 server. Some fancy toys, but not as ridiculously awesome as I'd expected.

Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system.

Actually, THIS just in - AT&Ts request for return of evidence denied.

Do you only have the rights that are explicitly defined in your constitution?

I think that Bruce Schneier's recent article in Wired is one of the most reasoned and insightful responses to your line of argumentation.

As he states, it is not a debate over security versus privacy - it is liberty versus tyranny.

You wouldn't let a government agent swing by every morning and look at all the mailing addresses on letters going to/from your house, why the hell would you let them do the same to your phone records?

How about some other examples:

* You're interviewed once a week to see who you've talked to. (polygraph not optional...)
* All of your trash is tagged and sent in for inspection.
* Cameras and microphones are installed outside your front door to record your activity.

These would be considered unacceptable. (Except for the last one in the UK, apparently.)

But consider where things are going. In about a decade it will probably be possible to process all phone audio in real time. In about 20 years active brain scan technology should make foolproof real time lie detection possible. (It's almost there now, just not real time.) In 50 years it should be easy to robotically sift through everyone's trash, recognize, categorize, and catalog the contents.

The question is whether we'll want to do these things, not whether we'll be able. How we react now will affect the decisions of future generations...

Wired News has posted the AT&T whistleblower's evidence, which AT&T is trying to get returned to them and out of court documents: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70908-0.htm l?tw=wn_index_3

What stops them from adopting one of the existing open source VMs, "embracing and extending" it (still open source, of course), and doing that now?

You do know that Microsoft gave the Kaffe project money, right? The stipulation was that Kaffe had to add Microsoft extensions to its codebase. Turns out, Kaffe never managed to produce a competitive VM (though it's looking pretty good these days) and thus never had the impact that Microsoft had hoped for.

Read it!

In the real world, the New Jersey state police do not close a rape case when partial prints are matched to a seventy-five year old war vet bound to a wheelchair in Petaluma.

That would be more comforting if I was a seventy-five year old war vet.

Fingerprinting everybody is just another version of mass screening. As is well-known from AIDS testing and the NSA phone screening, mass screening for rare events is a recipe for generating false positives. Right now fingerprints are useful and reliable because only targetted individuals are fingerprinted. If everybody was fingerprinted, the number of false positives would skyrocket.

But they can manage a company that makes voting machines. Who needs the right to vote himself when he can just rig the tally? ;-)

My synopsis of this article: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70869-0.htm l?tw=wn_index_1
Lamo just refused to give blood. He attempted to provide nail and hair clippings, but the authorities refused. The particular people he was dealing with do not have the equipment to extract DNA from those samples. They are only capable of extracting the DNA from a blood sample. Lamo did not refuse to give blood due to privacy concerns. Lamo objected to giving blood for religious reasons. It was not stated what Lamo's religious affiliation was, but Jehovah's Witnesses have been know to refuse giving blood samples. It was the ACLU that jumped all over this with the political agenda of promoting the privacy concerns involved.

I think we need to look for alternatives to Middle East oil in the short term,
and alternatives to polluting fuels in the long term .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel

The Algae is the best producer per this chart excerpted from that site :

                * Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (40 to 50 m/km)
                * Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 140 m/km)
                * Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130 m/km)
                * Jatropha: 175 US gal/acre (160 m/km)
                * Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (610 m/km) [2]
                * Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)

It also burns cleaner than conventional diesel and bio-diesel is added to petrol
diesel to meet emissions requirements . It is also better for the engine as well .

Some environmental groups take issue with the amount of fertilizer and other factors
it would take to grow enough Algae to produce enough oil to replace petrol diesel .

Fortunately some ppl have a solution to that .

In Southern California the Salton Sea has no outlet and is become super saturated
with phosphates and salt , more saline than the ocean in fact .

Tract ponds with Solar powered slow crawling harvesters could skim the Algae,
Extracting the algae which used the phosphates to grow and traps a large portion
of the salt in it thus lower salt levels in the water and fertilizer levels .

The tract ponds could be covered by clear recycled plastic to avoid massive
evaporation due to spreading out the water over such a large surface area .

It would be expensive to implement, but current we use over 140 billon gallons
of petrol based fuel , and at $3 a gallon approx. that is over 420 billion a year ,
4.2 trillion in a decade .

I think we could do it for a great deal less than that .

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

The above article covers the math behind what I have said .

Taking the above method and then using it with a very fuel efficient vehicle
and offer a REALISTIC tax break on the super fuel efficient car .

This prototype diesel car could reduce the amount of fuel used by commuters .

http://www.canadiandriver.com/articles/gw/vw1litre .htm

It is made from VERY expensive alloys and composites, a much more affordable
version would still achieve well over 100 mpg vs. near 300 mpg .

In the Long term the Algae production could be converted over to this :

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54456, 00.html

Algae making hydrogen ...

The synergy of saving the salton Sea and providing a tremendous amount of oil
to end our dependence on foreign oil for all time is taking lemons and making
lemonade in my mind .

Not to mention the eventual hydrogen production once more hydrogen cars ,
and filling stations are available and affordable .

All the variables are not worked out fully, nothing worth doing is easy, but it beats
the situation we face now and the worse one in the future .

Hope for the Future...

Ex_MislTech