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It's not impossible. I don't expect it from Netflix, but ESPN has already done this. Of course, it shouldn't be taken as an argument against network neutrality, this is an argument for it, but the ISPs try to twist it around...

Lockheed Martin is not the free market when it comes to government. They are closer to a lamprey.

The Virii were an ancient Roman noble family,
One of their descendents still roams free...

Steve Gibson's mantra: TNO. If the host has your encryption password/key, then they can't be trusted. If you don't believe that, ask Snowden's email provider, Lavabit's founder Ladar Levison: http://www.wired.com/2014/04/l...

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/o...

We can still break into the systems we "need" to break into, without keeping a full hand of all possible vulnerabilities. To reduce our overall exposure to risk, it makes sense to disclose most of these to vendors for patching, maybe some with a delay. Our government can buy up vulnerabilities from Exodus, then release them -- Exodus gets paid, we get somewhat better security all around, and the NSA gets a few last holes to work with.

"We have sought to strike an appropriate balance that helps protect consumers and root out illegal activity—without stifling beneficial innovation," he said in a statement.

We'll just see what Taaki and Wilson have to say about that balance...

"We have sought to strike an appropriate balance that helps protect consumers and root out illegal activity—without stifling beneficial innovation," he said in a statement.

We'll just see what Taaki and Wilson have to say about that balance...

Security through obscurity might work for something like a power plant control system because we don't know the architecture of the hardware that it runs on, the operating system or if there is a third-party OS, the language it's written in, or even its name, and given the importance of the application it probably wouldn't be permanently Internet-connected, and if it needs to send out notifications it might communicate through a unidirectional RS232 link or something along those lines, or through a transmit-only fiber link (so that there's not even receive hardware on the platform).

Power companies don't develop bespoke security on their control systems (and would likely suck if they did). A particular power system most likely use off-the-shelf 1970s or '80s Siemens systems whose specs are widely known through the industry because of the decades of technicians who have worked on them.

For example: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/ics/

Security through obscurity doesn't work because it relies on the security of your obscurity, and most of the time your obscurity is weak. Key-based crypto systems are a form of security through obscurity, the obscurity is your key. But you have a reasonable ability to control the key, if they are issued per-person/per-session/etc. A key crypto system becomes useless if the key is distributed to multiple people, because you've breached the security of your obscurity. OTOH, the back-end system for the key-crypto cannot be obscure because someone other than the individual user had to develop it, install it, maintain it, operate it, etc. The same is true of the power station example, since there must be thousands of people trained to maintain such systems, plus all the developers/etc at Siemens, plus any rival company who's reverse engineered a Siemens system to develop "compatible" systems, plus... In the case of a voting system, you've got all the system devs, all the system maints, all the people who have access to the secret Trust Me computer when it's in use, all the people who have access to the secret Trust Me computer when it's not in use, etc. Your obscurity is inherently insecure.

But in the case of voting (or vote counting, in this case), we don't want security through obscurity specifically because obscurity is a known risk in voting systems. We want security through multiple independent observation of the entire process, the more observers the better. A vote count that is carried out entirely within a piece of code on a computer is, by definition, no matter how secure and air-gapped and guarded that computer, unable to be observed by independent observers. It lacks the fundamental requirement of being verifiable.

That's why you can't beat a hand count.

[If they want to put the count on a computer, then every piece of data (in this case, the preference information on individual ballots) should be put on-line - in addition to the hand count. That way, hundreds of independent, 3rd party systems can do a quick electronic count, not just the AEC's secret Trust Me box. (Parties, NGOs, media networks, university politics professors, university statistics students, etc.) Likewise, during the data entry process by AEC officials, on-site observers watching over their shoulders would be able to, would be encouraged to, enter each ballot into their own separate (tablet/laptop-based) systems. If the results of the later official hand count disagrees wildly with the majority of 3rd party systems, it's cause for panic/re-count/inquiries. If a few 3rd party systems get different results from the majority, there's probably a flaw in those. In net, you end up with multiple, overlapping, self-reinforcing and completely open counting systems that assures everyone of the integrity of the system and which gets stronger over time, while at the same time giving the advantage of faster (electronic) results.]

Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine ( 07.15.11 )
http://www.wired.com/2011/07/d...
eg what was the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, ie countermessaging is now legal with the loss of the Smith–Mundt Act.
The 'using data from the micro-blogging service as an intel source to aid" ends up in an interesting way.
US military studied how to influence Twitter users in Darpa-funded research (9 July 2014)
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Snowden said he wrote emails that he can't produce despite taking almost two million documents. You can't explain that away since you are directly challenging him.

Ok, I'll stipulate that he claims he wrote them.

All this while intending to make the claim that he was a "whistle blower" on the US? And he forget the whistle he claims to have blown, repeatedly, while there? That doesn't wash.

I honestly and sincerely don't even see it as related. He may not even anticipated that someone would challenge. He was seeking to establish beyond credible doubt that the NSA was doing XYZ. That is "the story" he was looking to tell. That someone would try to argue that a big part of the story would be "hey, can you prove you tried to tell someone inside, first" possibly didn't even enter into his mind.

In the big picture, it doesn't even matter. What matters is what the NSA was doing, not how vigorously Snowden tried to change it from within first.

Regardless of how important this particular detail is to you, its at best a tangential detail to the main story.

Its just a small minded distraction to try and divert attention from the main story. Like obsessing over Julian Assange's significant personal flaws instead of focusing on the actual wiki leaks leaks.

Maybe because they don't exist?

That doesn't fly within this thread of the sub-argument.

You'd stipulated they DID exist and contained the NSA's response that they were legal. You can't now argue that maybe they didn't exist, at least not within this sub-thread.

Or they discuss classified programs that are still classified?

They could redact them. Even if they were just "walls of black ink", they would establish that they existed.

I expect that the NSA has done that in the proper forums for discussing classified matters: in meetings with the administration, in closed sessions of Congress, and before the courts in closed hearings.

You are contorting like an acrobat. You are arguing that "if they exist, the NSA is rightfully keeping them secret, therefore we should assume Snowden is lying about their existence, and that they don't exist". That's not even coherent.

Seems to me then, its perfectly reasonable to accept Snowden's claim they exist.

Which "general consensus" is that?

Lets see:
the 5 member Privacy and Civil liberties Oversight Board created by Congress ruled them illegal.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled them illegal.

United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled them illegal.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

http://www.wired.com/2013/12/b...

And even the NSA itself, has ADMITTED substantial wrongdoing.

http://thehill.com/policy/tech...

"The one on Slashdot?"

Yeah, sure, the one on slashdot too. ::eyeroll::

Citation: http://www.wired.com/2008/03/c...

That used to only reserved for blacks and 'communists'. Remember the FBI will target and try to crush anyone who is not white(enough), non-Christian and is not politically right enough. i.e. MLK, MalcomX, ACLU anyone who ever supported them. On the other hand, they had no problems supporting mafia thugs such as James "Whitey" Bulger. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Btw, we only have a bunch of 'criminals' (kinda like a 70's version of Snowden) to thank for exposing COINTELPRO.
Does anyone honestly think they just stopped? Read what they did during COINTELPRO and then ask yourself, do you think they, as well as the NSA or other groups, have any level they would not stoop to? What else have they done that just has not come out yet?

guess not: http://www.wired.com/2011/09/f...

As for the BS 'judge approval', they will simply rubber-stamp any request that comes in. Not to mention in a secret court!
To quote the Article: But its rulings are notoriously one-sided: In its 35-year history, the court has approved 35,434 government requests for surveillance, while rejecting only 12.

The USA just found some vials of smallpox lying around

Capitalism is a system designed to reward capitalists.

Capitalism is a system designed to assure private property rights. Through assuring protection of private property from appropriation form the state, the risk of investment is lowered, thus encouraging investment. Investment provides the capital that allows new types of jobs to be created and technology to be improved.

Thus capitalism rewards capitalist investors with enhanced returns on capital, rewards laborers with better and more well paying jobs because of improvements in their productivity due to higher levels of capital investment, and rewards consumers with improved products and technologies.

Monopoly is the natural end state of Capitalism. The big fish eat all the smaller fish, until there's only one big fish left.

Where is the evidence for this? Private property protection encourages competition because it incentivizes investment in new companies and technologies. We see this for example in accelerating Fortune 500 turnover and the turnover of the DJIA. For example, today we barely recognize the former DJIA companies Owens-Illinois Glass or Central Leather. The economic term for this is creative destruction.

Many large companies exist today created from scratch that did not exist 50 years ago (Starbucks, Best Buy, FedEx, Dell, Cisco, Sysco, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, ARM, AMD, Intel, Nvidia).

It is particularly difficult for a large organization to remain competitive over a long period of time. They build up too many entrenched internal power centers and often become blind to market change and technological change. See IBM for a company that started as mainly a hardware company, but has totally lost that market and is mainly a software consulting company today.

On the other hand, when the commanding heights of the economy are in the hands of the state, it is easy for the government to enforce monopolies of state-owned enterprises through regulation.

while the poor starve to death

Most actual deaths of people due to starvation occur in countries with low levels of economic freedom, not in countries that embrace private property rights and capitalism. Recent famines in Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, DRC, Ethiopia, and North Korea are occurring in states ranked in the Index of Economic Freedom as being "Mostly Unfree" or "Repressed", with many having a long recent history or even still being ruled by governments that claim allegiance to Marxist socialism (for example, Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, or the Workers' Party of Korea).

Ok, we need some links with more concrete figures:

1. Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk

Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable. The United States' GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.

I'm not saying that's a reasonable way to draw a budget, just to provide an estimate on what Musk is targeting. Since this article came out (Nov 2012), I think his cost estimations went up, and his funding plans shifted more to preparing a realistic IPO (not covering the whole thing, but some of the early stages). Cannot readily find a quote for that.

There are many more (somewhat obfuscated) details in that article, like this one:

Musk also ruled out SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by SPACE.com what vehicle would be used, he said, "I think you just land the entire thing."

Asked if the "entire thing" is the huge new reusable rocket — which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport — Musk said, "Maybe."

2. Elon Musk Says Ticket to Mars Will Cost $500,000

“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket — half a million dollars. It can be done,” he told the BBC.

Musk did hint that one of the keys to low-cost trips to the red planet would be the ability to not only refuel there, but also to reuse the entire spacecraft on the return trip. In the BBC interview Musk said by reusing the spacecraft, you end up with the same sorts of costs airlines face. Musk compared it to flying today where a 747 isn’t simply thrown away after a flight to London. Like the airplane, the cost of the spacecraft could be spread out over numerous flights rather than just a single trip making fuel one of the main expenses rather than the entire ship.

3. Tesla’s (TSLA) Musk On Colonizing the Red Planet

Asked about the possibility of a SpaceX IPO, Musk said the company’s plans are too long-term to attract many hedge fund managers, making an IPO unlikely any time soon.

“Maybe [when] we’re close to developing the Mars vehicle, or ideally we’ve flown it a few times, then I think going public would make more sense,” he said.

So, I can't comment on how realistic is each of his cost and time estimations, but he is trying hard to make them internally consistent, and most and first of all, to bring down the launch costs and to improve the reusability. We can already see several successful steps in that direction, and we will see the gradual progress, or lack thereof, very soon. It's not some Kickstarter scheme for Gates & Buffet.

The species is more of a macroscopically observable manifestation of a collection of genes plus noise.

Which makes it something that doesn't happen at the level of genes - by definition of "macroscopically observable".

We don't say, for a similar example, that music operates at the level of the Brownian motion of air particles even though sounds such as those of music are transmitted through such a medium. You would be glossing over both the macroscopic properties of the air medium which define and transmit sound and the structure of music (and its perception by a human audience) which differentiates it from arbitrary sounds.

You really don't have to

Cities and states are already helping with the next gen of contractors via networked street lights.
A city gets basic energy saving with a lot of optional extras to contain any freedom of assembly and association.
Voice as in mic, voice stress, gait, wifi and everything a camera offers over every road or public area.
Fun with wifi funds? 'SPD will shut off its new Wi-Fi after privacy backlash" (November 15, 2013)
http://seattletimes.com/html/l...
CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher (03.15.12) for the next generation of basic consumer appliances.
http://www.wired.com/2012/03/p...
Add in a smart meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with a rapid communications setting.
Then you have your tame game console with "webcam" from bands who love to help all govs over all product lines.
As for Network Frequency Analysis, it sounds like something others have hinted at from the TEMPEST generations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Importantly -- and contrary to the apparent beliefs of some commentators -- not all HSR is subject to the federal regulations, including IRB review. By the terms of the regulations themselves, HSR is subject to IRB review only when it is conducted or funded by any of several federal departments and agencies (so-called Common Rule agencies), or when it will form the basis of an FDA marketing application. HSR conducted and funded solely by entities like Facebook is not subject to federal research regulations...

- Everything you need to know about Facebook's manipulative experiment

Are we talking about the bitcoin that was used on Silk Road?

Absolutely.

They already have lasers, have you been living under a rock, or behind the moon?

And, if you forgot, the original laser sharks were created during the American civil war.

So they had a bad meeting. It happens. It's even worse across language barriers. Most successful business teams get over that.

Google gets that automatic driving can kill people. The guys from social pushing "Cruise" put shiny plastic on lane keeping and adaptive cruise control and call it automatic driiving. They're right in the middle of the "deadly valley" - it's good enough you can take your hands off the wheel, but not good enough you can trust it. Those guys are going to be a problem.

GM is in serious legal and PR trouble right now because they have an ignition switch problem which causes cars to stop if people have a keychain with too much stuff on it. 13 GM people have already been fired. Google has never faced having to take responsibility like that.

The software industry is used to being able to dump its product liability on the customer. This will not work in the "Internet of Things".

Yeah and if MI6 had grown a spine and called bullshit on the CIA case for WMD's in Iraq

Except:

1. Everybody agreed, Iraq had WMDs — not just the war-mongering Bushitler and his blood-thirsty neocons, but the wise respectable statesmen and women of the previous Administration
2. They were all correct — Saddam Hussein really did have WMDs, although not as much as we feared or as Iraqi generals hoped for

When two geniuses mate, the result is often an autistic child: http://archive.wired.com/wired...

Just think what software products people work at home with and then infect their private computers with :)
Be very careful around any laptop, software package, system or network that is offered for home use.
"School-Webcam Spy Scandal Resurfaces" (06.08.11)
http://www.wired.com/2011/06/w...
Use a wired network and only a direct wired network, no routers, wifi, other computers or home networked devices running, expect any webcam or mic to be on at all times.
When done with a free work 'laptop' or network, power down, remove and ensure your own privacy is fully restored.

He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.

Why should we give welfare to everybody when only a few people need it?

Anyway, if you're living below the poverty line, you probably bike or take mass transit, so the gas tax won't affect you directly. Yes, it will raise store prices slightly, but it will also reduce the need to make up the shortfall with transportation sales taxes such as Measure R in Los Angeles. For the poor, higher store prices in exchange for lower sales taxes is not such a bad tradeoff.

A person truly concerned for the welfare of the poor opposes minimum parking requirements, which raise housing prices, raise prices at the store, raise tax rates, and places a traffic burden on the nearby streets and freeways; and supports demand-responsive tolling which is less regressive than fuel taxes and makes the roads more efficient and therefore reduces or eliminates the need to widen them at taxpayer expense.

Mat Honan is no stranger to this kind of stuff and I'm really tired of hearing what he has to say. The thing that soured me was when he stuck his phone in his back pocket, sat on it in a taxicab, and the screen cracked...and promptly whined to someone else at Wired and had them write a whole article about phone glass to justify that it wasn't his fault that he plopped his ass down on his phone and busted the screen. This guy seems to blunder constantly and then blames all of the things that happened on someone else.

Last week the US Marshals did it.

I read about this in Wired more than 5 years ago.

Specifically, an article by Wil McCarthy, here:
http://archive.wired.com/wired...

> this is at worst a covert communications channel that could be used to bypass network security controls in order to exfiltrate information from an otherwise secure network

Dude, you answered your own damn question. Covert communications channels for otherwise secure networks are a big fucking deal.

Complaining that this is not full-blown "bad bios" is to totally miss the point that something like this is absolutely necessary for a real life "bad bios." We've already seen a ton of other ways to get the software on the secure network in the first place.

Sorry, folks, but it is sooo easy to predict this will all amount to nothing, once Lawrence Lessig's name is mentioned.

Talk about your professional misdirection specialist, scion of wealth, the guy who couldn't be bothered to tell Aaron Swartz that federal prosecutors had dropped one of the punishments against Aaron they were pushing for --- namely forbidding Aaron from ever going online again, and then Aaron committed suicide!

Lawrence Lessig, the dood that attended the second-to-the-last Bilderberger forum, with senior executives of Stratfor and Palintir Technology --- you gotta be kidding me, if anyone takes anything serious about Lessig, he's the guy to coopt everything.

For some real news:

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/f...

According to Wired, it sort of depends on which questions you decide to ask.

WIRED: Where are you from?
Goostman: A big Ukrainian city called Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea

WIRED: Oh, I’m from the Ukraine. Have you ever been there?
Goostman: ukraine? I’ve never there. But I do suspect that these crappy robots from the Great Robots Cabal will try to defeat this nice place too.

That Gary Wolf hit piece about Xanadu is one of the worst things written on the subject... he apparently figured he could get away with empty vapid sneering on some logic like "if he's so smart why isn't he rich?". Be sure to look at the comments published at wired, including the second one by Nelson himself http://archive.wired.com/wired... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Well, the National Space Society already has a space roadmap:
http://www.nss.org/settlement/...

I will also unapologetically list my twenty-some-year old Footsteps to Mars, presented at Case for Mars V, Boulder CO, 26-29 May 1993.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/f...

I'll admit Hollywood and artists have given us some wonderfully scary imagery of the killer robots of the future:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-i...
http://ockhamsbeard.files.word...

But I suspect the real future will be more like:

http://www.wired.com/images_bl...

Or the much less vulnerable and maintainable:

http://eandt.theiet.org/news/2...

Coupled with thermal imagery, a simple AI to identify sneaking human patrols, and (at least at first) a go/no go command from some Private Tentpeg hunkered down in a bunker or OP somewhere. Trust me on this: I've BEEN that Private Tentpeg .. and later, his supervisor. It isn't far, in the front lines, from a tripwire connected to a hand grenade" to a much more complicated (and even more lethal) machine. How much "intelligence" will be vested in that machine is just a quibble. Trip wires aren't smart at all, yet we've never hesitated to use them.

Clearly this summary is trolling for posts. Robots have killed, and there is a compelling reason to be wary.
http://www.wired.com/2007/10/r...

Not because robots are going to gain self-awareness and kill mercilessly, but because the human beings using robots for killing are way less careful than they should be. To the fighters in Yemen and Afghanistan, whether the drones are self-aware or not doesn't make a difference to the fact that they are targeted for termination. This is the life they are born in. They are fighting robots which are trying to wipe out their albeit misguided way of living.

Right now people are making the decisions, but what if people lose the stomach? What if the President had the capability to deploy drones which could discern on their own which people are likely to be a threat to US interests? This is almost too close to reality. In fact, the false positive rates of the robots are likely to be lower than people who may be impacted by seeing firsthand what has happened to their fellow soldiers. But does that make it any less worrisome?

Here's a new sneaky approach, less destructive but so far effective: U.S. Marshals Seize Cops; Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU

So, although disobeying a direct order, the police seize the spying records of the police and respond with "We do not discuss pending litigation". Lol. These former bathroom bad boys are a real laugh riot. If they aren't doing anything wrong, what do they have to hide? More than likely, it would be discovered they were practicing their sexual predator skills, including pedophilia.

This is the kind of attitude one gets when the minimum requirement for being employed in the security sector is being a school yard football faggot with a gym yard GED. Extra points if someone in your family is already a member of the union.

It's time to seriously consider constitutionally defined police powers spread into several well defined (non-crippling) checks and balances derived from mainstream representation independently diverse enough to be valid.

Here's a new sneaky approach, less destructive but so far effective: U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU

> OTOH, the federal government uses "national security" as an excuse to violate the constitution. What's local law enforcement's excuse?

Local security!

Actually, it is probably convenient corporate security.

Slots? Impossible :)

http://www.wired.com/images_bl...

The "hack" was to get the operator of the video poker machine to enable the "double or nothing" bonus, which had a unique bug.

Most newer video poker and slot machines allow (or can allow) you to play at various coin values. Each credit can be $0.01, $0.05, $0.25, $1, $5, etc.

This particular machine would allow you to wager at $0.01, reach the Double or Nothing screen, use a combination of keys to get to the credit value change screen, and return to the Double or Nothing wager with your bet still pending.

In short, you would put in a $100 bill. You would wager 100 of your 10,000 credits at $0.01/credit ($1) until you won, and when reaching the Double or Nothing screen, you would navigate out to the change credit screen. You'd change your credit value to $5 per credit (dropping you down to ~20 credits in the bank), return to the DoN screen with your bet IN CREDITS, NOT DOLLARS still pending and then you'd stand a chance to win 400 credits (twice your original CREDIT win) on your DoN bet. you could win $400 on $1, on what should have been a simple 2-1 (doubled) 4-1 payout.

The spread likely wasn't $0.01/$5.00, probably was $0.25/$2.00 at the most, but by picking and choosing good payouts to DoN on, they were essentially playing machines with a winning paytable. [Since DoN's didn't pay double or zero, they paid 16x or zero.]

3D printed guns are in their infancy and already quite capable according to these tests in Wired.

Musk thinks an 80,000 person colony on Mars can be established for around 36 billion, total.

"Musk added that he sees the future 80,000-person colony as a public-private enterprise costing roughly $36 billion."

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/e...

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is going to go ahead and do it anyway: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/e...

I wouldn't bet my life on his succeeding, but I wouldn't bet it on his failing, either.

My smartphone reboots itself regularly for no obvious reason.

That's probably not AT&T or verizon's fault though.

I used to be able to run a phone on full batteries for 2 days without a recharge. (Yes, phones "do more", but I don't bloody well want most of the more and the bits I do want aren't any bloody good! That is NOT a good exchange for 1/12th the uptime and nobody sells low-consumption phones any more.)

Well then go back to a dumb phone. 38 days of battery life on the nokia 515. Or buy an expanded battery. Plus, again, how is that your carrier's fault?

I can't remember the last free phone upgrade offered.

Did phone companies ever offer you a phone that was worth more than $20 without a contract?

The first part of your post makes sense I think but asking AT&T to give you a free portable computer that has no software problems and doesn't occasionally need energy is a bit unrealistic.

The difference is that now we have a whole generation that is unemployed on a massive scale, with inequality and automation sqeezing the populace ever tighter, and computer models telling us that the shit is indeed going to hit the fan:

http://www.wired.com/2013/04/c...

If you even skim defense news you'll also see that the US military is putting a lot of priority on "handling" unrest inside the US.

This is a better article than Guardian crap: http://www.wired.com/2013/10/l...

- June 28 - warrant for metadata for one user
- Lavabit fails to comply
- July 16 - warant for SSL keys
- Lavabit freaks out and still refuses to comply
- August 5 court threatens contempt and $5,000/day fine and Lavabit shuts down

Not making a comment on who is right. It's just misleading to ignore the first part hence you've been mislead.

> Why didn't Sony make the PS4 hardware more like that of the PS3?

There are 2 parts to the answer: hardware + software.

SCEA, the games division of Sony, is NOT in the hardware business -- they are in the entertainment business. SAY WHAT?! But you ask "They designed all the hardware for the PS1, PS2, and PS3. What changed??"

Designing and Developing custom hardware is incredibly expensive. Sony was in the RED for about 4 years due to paying an expensive development cost on the PS3. The PS2 GPU - the GS - had a hardware bug where one of the Z-Test modes was completely broken! Sony was not going to repeat that same costly mistakes.

There is a reason commodity off-the-shelf hardware is cheap. Mass produced, and "good enough", which means "fast enough." Why pay engineers to "re-invent" the wheel for an CPU + GPU when there are already OTHER companies out there who have sunk a ton of man-hours and money into producing them??

Second, by using standard hardware, instead of fast "esoteric" hardware, you make it easier for developers.

Developers were constantly complaining to SCEA saying that while the PS3 had more power then the Xbox360 the XBox360 was vastly easier to develop for. Microsoft had a better compiler + IDE compared to the SN toolchain (which Sony eventually bought.)

> Then less effort would be needed to ensure PS3 games are portable to the newer system.

This doesn't make any financial sense.

The PS3 has 1 CPU (PowerPC Cell / PPE) plus 6 co-processors (SPE). The SPEs have 256KB of RAM but are EXTREMELY fast. The SPEs have their own assembly language.

The multi-core x86 means SCEA didn't have to focus on A) a compiler for the PowerPC Cell, and B) another compiler for the SPE. They can leverage GCC x86 across the board especially with x86 having 4 - 8 cores now.

For the full story will want to see these:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* http://www.wired.com/2013/11/p...
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...

Because the PS3's hardware was stupid.

No, it was not.

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/w...

Deploying broadband infrastructure isn't as simple as merely laying wires underground: that's the easy part. The hard part - and the reason it often doesn't happen - is the pre-deployment barriers, which local governments and public utilities make unnecessarily expensive and difficult.

Before building out new networks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must negotiate with local governments for access to publicly owned "rights of way" so they can place their wires above and below both public and private property. ISPs also need "pole attachment" contracts with public utilities so they can rent space on utility poles for above-ground wires, or in ducts and conduits for wires laid underground.

The problem? Local governments and their public utilities charge ISPs far more than these things actually cost. For example, rights of way and pole attachments fees can double the cost of network construction.