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Google has gotten lots of $$$$ from the NSA and the CIA and is in complete bed with them. Google gives -everything- to the NSA and CIA

Things that make you go HMMMMM...

http://gizmodo.com/confirmed-nsa-paid-google-microsoft-others-millions-1188615332

http://www.infowars.com/googles-deep-cia-and-nsa-connections/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/217550/google_watchdog_white_house.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/palantir_denies_powering_prism_spy_system/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-upheld/

http://www.prisonplanet.com/nsa-funds-new-top-secret-60-million-dollar-data-lab.html

Read this fine article for some more "down to earth" ideas about this study: http://ww.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/largest-volcano-on-earth-it-is-all-about-timing/

I still say this falls under freedom of speech.

I'm not sure that I disagree with you, but I think it's more like http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/alfred-anaya/all/, where giving someone the tools to do something, when you're sure they're doing bad things, could be illegal. Lock-picking tools are not dangerous explosives or high-tech, but still illegal to have, no?

...is that the government not only knows how to really detect lies (using "brain state" fMRI scanning), but also DOES NOT want this technology to become widely adopted because they are afriad that the technology will one day be used against *them*...

so, as is so typical with the legal system, this guy is rotting in a jail smelling farts for something that's just total nonsense.

http://www.lacontelab.org/papers/real-time-fmri-using-brain-state-classification.pdf

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying.html

but they tend not to screw with cryptography which is allowed to be on the GSA schedule when embodied in communications equipment for sale to the U.S.Military.

So the NSA did not screw with Dual_EC_DRBG in the NIST standard? Or is it just that any hardware which implements Dual_EC_DRBG is going to be rejected without explanation when it is submitted for FIPS 140 certification?

Bruce Schneier http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/black-budget-what-exactly-are-the-nsas-cryptanalytic-capabilities/ stated that "Breakthroughs in factoring have occurred regularly over the past several decades, allowing us to break ever-larger public keys. Much of the public-key cryptography we use today involves elliptic curves, something that is even more ripe for mathematical breakthroughs. It is not unreasonable to assume that the NSA has some techniques in this area that we in the academic world do not. Certainly the fact that the NSA is pushing elliptic-curve cryptography is some indication that it can break them more easily."

This is most probably correct, given the proof of the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture, thus proving Fermat's last theormen, and resulting in the establishment of the Modularity Theorem. On a related note, isn't 25519 a rational number? Meaning elliptic curve 25519 has a modular form? Meaning that Tor's choice of curve is rather subject to modular attack?

Just saying...

Bruce Schneier http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/black-budget-what-exactly-are-the-nsas-cryptanalytic-capabilities/ stated that "Breakthroughs in factoring have occurred regularly over the past several decades, allowing us to break ever-larger public keys. Much of the public-key cryptography we use today involves elliptic curves, something that is even more ripe for mathematical breakthroughs. It is not unreasonable to assume that the NSA has some techniques in this area that we in the academic world do not. Certainly the fact that the NSA is pushing elliptic-curve cryptography is some indication that it can break them more easily."

I'd not rush from DH to ECC but would strongly recommend a move to 2048-bit or above keys

And have just realised that I haven't posted to Slashdot for many years...And yet somehow my .sig is still relevant. NSA may have dropped their plans for mandatory Escrow 15 years ago after the quote was made...but they didn't change the fundamental goal: to read everything.

Attacking terrorists that are fighting against the US and Afghan governments isn't terrorism. The terrorists can thank Bin Laden's leadership for their predicament since he declared war on the US on their behalf. They then proceeded to attack the US for years, killing many hundreds and wounding thousands, before the US really got serious about fighting back.

Bin Laden's Fatwa

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

Where do you pee?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/nasa-osmotic-water-bag/
http://gizmodo.com/the-sweat-to-water-purifier-real-life-dune-still-suit-826806326

I'm more inclined to trust Bruce Schneier who says "I trust the mathematics," than the authors of this sensationalist NYTimes article. To me, it seems like they completely lack any nuanced understanding of the information flow and its vulnerabilities and are merely depending on whatever third-hand analysis they might have gleaned from reading other amateur blogs.

I agree that going to the service providers (e.g., google, yahoo, apple, phone companies, etc.) or building a backdoor into the software is a good way to go about it, but I hardly think that means that the NSA is "winning the war on encryption."

Sorry, wrong link, I meant this: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115

From Bruce Schneier Here and here.

Also a nice call to arms here.
"I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better."

Designed to create the belief:
1 - Intelligence intercepts and interrogations are effective at getting information that "protects" "us".

And you dispute that? People seem to be pretty eager to read them for what you think are ineffective methods.

2 - Drones are an effective weapon against "our" "enemies" and not principally dangerous to villagers and local civic functions.

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

You take issue with referring to the ever fun-loving Taliban and al Qaida as enemies?

17 Beheaded in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan for Attending Wedding Party with Dancing
Taliban Hangs Afghan Boy, 7, for Spying
I was one of the Taliban's torturers: I crucified people

How do you think they should be referred to? As the, "Asian gentlemen with a minor beheading problem?" "The life of the party with a suicide vest?" "The local representatives of Crucifier's Anonymous - the 12 step program to kill all your enemies?"

Change is hard for a lot of people.

That's a nice bromide... and it's easy to blame unspecified 'people' but it's bullshit in this case. Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been rolling out change after ill thought out change in page layout, UI, and functionality. They're trying to be 'hip' and 'modern' and failing miserably while alienating their existing userbase.

I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features.

Like what? And more importantly why? The system worked, and worked well.

Really? Go read the highest rating comments at the bottom of this article?

Now explain to me how it is not a fear of change? Wired is not exactly Neophyte monthly but the fact that people are so angry and will fight tooth and nail to resist a poorly made 12 year old operating system because they do not like the colors and icons of Windows 7 is amazing!

It doesn't matter what you do. People will find fault with anything new if it is something out of their control. Me? I have no idea what yahoo groups did as I left sometime early to mid last of the last decade! Tired of porn spammers every 10 minutes drove me physchologically insane so my guess is only older neoyphtes keep using it out of habit.

Maybe their could be something wrong? Maybe not. All I know is no matter what anything does people whine and cry about change whether it is a browser, OS, website, API, whatever.

Nope this can't work. Unless you physically control the server it could be accessed through coercion. If you send the public key to the server through the Internet using anything less than symmetric key encryption with a key that only you have, and have never sent through the Internet, that's at risk of being snooped by the NSA.

For a while I thought high-level ECDH SSL, if self-generated, might work as NSA-proof encryption but after reading this article I'm not so sure.

That was extreme.

Want to see a real life example? Geeks might think this is funny or frustrating sad to read the comments at the bottom of this article?

See the fear, anger, and sillyness for the mere suggestion of change gets people all rallied up!

This my friends is why Linux wont ever take off, let alone something more modern for PC users but that is totally another topic. The point here is people fear change and their comfort zone soo much they will defend their right to use 12 year old insecure operating systems even when confronted with facts. It is like they need to find something to be afraid of to justify their actions and beliefs.

The older you get the worse it gets. People want to watch TV, not invest in their careers on the weekends. People sometimes do the same boring old trips every year because taht is what they always do. They order the same food at restuarants. Restaurant Impossible has chef Irvine come in with new items and some old timers like the frozen crap because that is what they always order after he makes changes to attract new customers.

Multiple that for anything more drastic and you have people whine about their lives, where they live, and be envious of those who take risks, change careers, move, and do things in life that require lots of work and a step waaay out of their comfort zone. Oh it must be luck etc. It is not luck. They worked hard and did not fear change.

Sometimes it is not extreme examples of phobias listed or liberties like what this article is about, but rather small changes most today will not do and then be shocked when they do not get their desired results.

So, a private company has been helping 400 open source projects with code quality (usually considered important) for quite some time now using their tools which find many different code defects. It had been started with government money, but now they take it out of hide. And do you shed any light on it? Provide more information? No, you just make uninformed comments about things that have easy to find answers and whine. What a waste.

Some of the better-known projects scanned include Apache, Firefox, GIMP and a number of forms of Linux and BSD.

Open Source Is Better Than the Closed Stuff (Until You Hit 1 Million Lines)

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World

This actually makes the United States look good, doesn't it?

"Just look at the kinds of threats we have to deal with! If we didn't have these massive surveillance capabilities, our government would soon be overrun by terrorists!"

Is this the best we can expect from the Washington Post now that they're working "in consultation with the Obama administration"?

I hate these articles...the headlines are insulting and are subtly racist IMHO...

Headline should read: "Haha look at these Egyptian rubes! These camel jockeys don't understand technology and that is humorous."

But it is absolutely within the realm of possibility for someone to use a live bird for surveillance, especially when you look at what the Israelis are developing right in the open.

The technical ability and implicit demand are there for a live bird/spy drone.

I think anyone who laughs at these Egyptians is the true idiot.

These Egyptians may not have the technical schooling we do, but they appear to understand what their enemy is moving towards.

I hate that we mock them for this!

Doesn't involve a judge though. Just the DEA.

Wrong. If there's a subpoena, there's a judge.

Not necessarily. The DEA gained the ability to issue 'administrative subpoenas' in 1970, and uses them routinely and on a nontrivial scale. All they have to do is assert that the material is 'relevant to an investigation' and out it goes. No muss, no fuss, no tedious judicial oversight.

Dunning-Kruger is becoming the new Godwin.

As long as a no dead salmon ever asks for a government job.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

Nearly as much pseudoscience as a poliygraph.

Or how about.... how can you drive back home from Hawaii; if something political you posted causes you to get No-Fly listed while you happen to have stopped there on vacation or en route to your destination?

If I recall correctly there are some military bases in the western United States that have had ARMED robot sentries for the better part of a decade. I suppose these are not exactly the smartest robots ever, little more than unmanned ATVs with sensor packages driving preprogrammed routes looking for movement/heat sources. If they find one they target their gun and wait for orders from a manned security post. While I don't have a real problem with security drones arming them with anything (lethal or non) is a bad idea, many authority figures already have god complex, I can only imagine it getting worse if they have the power of life, death & excruciating pain at the behest of their keyboard.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/02/army-gets-more/

While I have no doubt that TFA describes a fine public service built by those of the highest integrity, I must confess that my first thought was quite the opposite, given recent history.

Spacesuits are a lot more complicated than they look, NASA's suits have a lot of sealed bearings and straps and bellows below the surface to allow easy movement and reduce the ballooning effect:

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/08/an-insane-look-at-the-inside-of-space-suits/?viewall=true

Re: bypass the FISA courts.
Thats the idea of the 'cloud' vision - every system on the same network with an understanding of how to get the data out in realtime.
Where the NSA seemed to have problems is the need for some legal domestic front cover e.g. FBI to be the name on their pipe.
With a system like this, so many groups get legal data, the NSA will never have to wait, be dependant on one stream again.
ie privacy will work both ways - nobody will really know who is getting the data 'out' just that the "credential management" worked. It seems to be a new vision of an older idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor's_Management_Information_System
More at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html?topic=&topic_set=
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/07/11/prisms-controversial-forerunner/
Welcome to a very legal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Core

Amazon kills competition. Great!
People have to find new jobs.
Robots work for Amazon.
Man, that really sucks. . . .

Amazon used to be a hand-picking operation, where computers told the people what to do. Then Amazon bought Kiva Robotics, which was already handling about 10% of online orders with their mobile robots. Those new Amazon warehouses have lots of mobile robots and very few people. "15 minutes from click to ship."

As for jobs making the robots, Kiva Systems has only 250 employees. A few robot factories, a modest number of huge automated warehouses, and maybe half of the whole retail sector disappears.

It's even fuel efficient. The biggest energy consumption in groceries is the trip by the two-ton SUV to the grocery store to move 20 pounds of products.

Hmm, I'd rather not be the frozen corpse they try to resurrect for grins long after sentient immortality is achieved, instead just scan me in and utilize me as a blueprint now.

I mean, I'm a hacker and researcher of cybernetics and neuroscience, so folks like me would be the best canditades since we could help you wake us up from the inside if we catch a glimmer of awareness. That is: We could escape the "Chinese Box" if we found ourselves in it. I've got so many things to do, but not enough life-span to do it all, and being digitized means we could over-come that glacial 20Hz organic brain cycle limit... Digitize me, bro. What could possibly go wrong?
Mua haha ha Ha!

THis is just changing the orientation of subunits and spacing of subunits without changing the center of mass. It would not seem magical if theywere connected by gears. Here they are doing it with magnetic coupling. But there's no "propulsion" since that implies changing the center of mass.

the chinese have a method for massless propulsion however:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/09/chinese-buildin/

Not practical.

If you load Symantec Endpoint even an XP machine with 1 gig of ram will slow to a crawl. There is a difference between running notepad in a bare boot vs installing things that run at startup.

If you have a pentium IV with 1 gig or less XP is a better choice to leave on their until April 2014. Core2Duo with 2 gigs and PCI-E would be in my professional opinion the bare minimum for running light tasks with Windows 7 with aero enabled. Better not break what is not broken too if such a user has an old beast he or she has 10+ years of crap and settings at this point.

And +4 gigs of ram and a Phenom or quad core core2 or a icore3+ would be the most ideal for users who have +30 tabs in a modern browser and have many apps like visual studio and photoshop open for good performance.

As stated in my other article users prefer XP as evident in the comments in this computer oriented website. If you think that is just an anomaly read Wired magazine's reactions to XP eradication day?

If Windows 7 was the best OS ever why are you seeing such angry responses at Microsoft and fearing to change?

You lost us as soon as you said XP is better than 7.

It isn't.

The trouble with Windows 8 is it's Vista - enough small things are annoying that it adds up to a great big annoyance. If they'd just finish it off (clue: listen to customers), it could be great.

Oh?

Why don't you tell that to the users leaving comments article from zdnet then? In only 48 hours +300 angry responses with "MS YOU WILL NOT TAKE MY XP AWAY!!!"

There is even an IT director who is fighting tooth and nail to not upgrade to Windows 7 on that page of comments I linked and FYI I linked a technology site too. Imagine responses from a more not so computer oriented site with the news of XP eradication?

Users prefer XP if you asked most users on the street.

I prefer Windows 7 but I am in the minority who like aero snap, instant search, and the extra security, and I am a visual learning. Contextual learners need text not pictures on the task bar. A pic of Firefox has no meaning to them as it requires mental effort to decode. If you are visual you do not look for text but for Mozilla icon as an example. ... now lets extend that learning to the ribbon. If you need text and visuals do not ring in a bell your brain the same way then the ribbon is fucking torture! These users prefer Office 2003 and the new interface is a regression and change for the sake of change.

More UI regressions are listed here including the ability to sort pictures, cut and paste from the address bar in the window on a corporate network, quick launch apps on the task bar (no jumplists are not the same thing), and other things users for over 12 years are used too and feel comfortable as that is all they know at this point in time in terms of getting used to it.

Windows 7 is a big improvement over Vista which is another reason I like it as I used Vista. However, if you skipped it then it is not really an improvement is it then?

But, it still has vista issues with file copying and buggy networking. I have one user who has to do a restore every Monday as his network connections forget the proxy to the internet. He misses XP greatly as it just worked in comparison. At home Windows 7 can not copy more than 1.5 megs a second while XP can do far more over the same connection when copying to network shares.

Also, if you move a user from an OU twice and leave an old ARP entry the user will see an endless welcome screen. XP would launch right up and a trust relationship errors happen less over XP as well.

However
It is time to move on in my opinion and stop hating change. But do not look at the XP holdouts as cheapsakes and those who are terrified of change. Windows 7 internally is supperior and it does have its benefits if you are willing to learn them over XP too, but man it changes many things unecessary and ruins the compatibility of apps.

That is why XP users do not want and many will not upgrade after 2014. MS will need to do something like disable internet access through a patch by that time as 37% of all internet users still fucking use that and have no plans to change until MS makes something compelling.

Windows 9 has to look and act exactly like XP before they will change.

Just FYI: whenever you read "Romanian" in the news regarding crime, and it's not related to the country of Romania, it actually means "gypsy"

That would be somewhat more likely if this were a story about petty crime like pickpocketing or car theft (but even there, some amount of ethnic Romanian immigrants are perfectly capable of engaging in petty crime). But when it comes to crime involving computer exploits, they are considerably more likely to be ethnic Romanian and not Roma. For example, this Wired article about online theft involves a number of young people who are not Roma .

Living in Romania myself and seeing it treated like a pariah abroad in spite of the fact that some parts of it are among the best educated and cultured parts of Europe, I am used to the tendency of many to blame the country's ills on the Roma, but good and evil is inside of everyone ethnicity.

This "Romanians = gypsies = criminals" connection is also dangerous one, as it can really mislead people about moving populations in Europe. I spend a lot of time in Finland, and I watched as one community lamented a large Roma tribe that flooded their town each summer, begging, pickpocketing and recycling. They called them "the Romanians" and that formed everyone's opinion about the country. When I tried to start a conversation with one of them in a queue at a supermarket's bottle-return machine, it turned out all of them were from a small town in central Bulgaria. But for some reason, Bulgaria never gets rubbished half as much as Romania.

In related studies from yesteryear: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

Free and open source, dude. Just not released yet because it's funded by DARPA CFT and still ongoing research: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/darpa-fast-track/

This Hushmail? They already gave customers emails to US authorities, and we are talking about 6 years ago. Not sure how or if things changed, but i would avoid them, or at the very least their web interface.

At the NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah, they have AES-cracking clusters which use custom ASICs, not GPUs. As Wired reported back in 2012, the NSA has made some yet-undisclosed major advance in cryptanalysis against AES and that made it feasible for them to build the Bluffdale lab in 2006 specifically to crack AES128 messages on demand. AES256 appears to still be secure, though.

Like releasing the same document twice, with different redactions? http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/08/2013851618340986.html
Or information on an Iraqi shooting? http://gcn.com/articles/2005/05/13/pdf-user-slipup-gives-dod-lesson-in-protecting-classified-information.aspx
Or when the TSA published their 'classified' handbook? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/tsa-leak/
Or when the UK revealed their nuclear submarine secrets? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13107413

To my knowledge, there haven't really been allegations of people digging into these records for specific unethical and abusive purposes.

Actually, there has.

Someone at the NSA was snooping through Bill Clinton's email.

Another reference
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/

"For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster."

"640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer." - Bill Gates (Not Really: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484)

Did Red Flag Linux never catch on? I wonder if Ubuntu Kylin will? http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/ubuntu-china/

Not true. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/11/lytro-3d-feature/

Lytro is desperate to find an application where their technology is relevant. Now they are claiming perspective shift as a feature they've "launched".

The world is really excited about 1 MP camera these days, especially one that can wiggle the perspective a few mm in each direction or reduce the depth of field, just not both at the same time. ;)

Just like Sparc, the Power architecture is dead and Itanium will follow shortly thereafter. Why? Because the X86 architecture and X86-64 specifically has won the marketplace in terms of compatibility and cost. Sure, I may get 8 billion threads on a Sparc III but it's slow and for the price I can get a few few X86-64 boxes. ARM is now knocking on the door of the Data Center and we then may see a rush of specialized, disposable servers that are suited for a small number of purposes, highly optimized and which point X86-64 architectures may still have a niche but not as big of one moving forward.

Mars one will not repeat this achievement. It lacks the money, the people and the technology by an enormous margin.

All you need is the right enabling technology and you can dramatically lower your mission costs. And the US government clearly has developed the necessary technology, so it's just a matter of convincing them to share it with the Mars One folks.

I'm still surprised this is such big news when the AT&T scandal got little national interest.

Around 1997-1998 the bottom seemed to fall out of the educational software market in general, including with prices falling for boxed software and expectations rising for artwork and embedded video. That was unfortunate for me and my wife as we were just finishing a first version of an educational garden simulator. I first had the initial idea about ten years earlier while a program administrator for the NOFA-NJ organic farm certification program; too bad it took so long to bring it to fruition (including going to graduate school in biology). Guess time-to-market is really important. :-)

Mergers were one issue, I agree, including trying to get MECC interested in distributing our software back then. Perhaps the rise of the web was another. Store shelves were full of fighting and competitive games to get the dollars of kids. A bigger issue was was maybe that parents who bought educational software looked for checklists of how the software would help their child get better grades in school at specific school tasks -- which generally has a tangential-at-best relationship to true education (see John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Alife Kohn, etc.).

Still, there is a lot of great educational software out there now, between apps, the web, PCs, and so on. Examples (including Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft):
"8 Videogames to Get Your Kid Into Engineering"
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/12/videogames-engineering-kids/?pid=3191&viewall=true

And that includes tools anyone can use in an interesting way, whether 3D design tools or even just word processors for writing up a story.

Still, from what you say, maybe we are lucky that the rights to our garden simulator software never got entwined with MECC, because then we could not have offered it for free with source for about fifteen years as we have.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/

I worked unrelated jobs during writing that software. And it took years by my wife and me of working for others at unrelated jobs like at IBM Research to pay back what we had borrowed to finish it. It was such a loss of our being tooled up to further improve the software (and a couple related programs built on the same base, PlantStudio and StoryHarp software). Another couple years of being in the groove full-time focusing on that after the software was done, responding to feedback from users, and it all might have turned into something really spectacular. We had triaged out broader cooperative gaming aspects from the first version of Garden Simulator (like the Harvest Moon series succeeded at later), but hoped to add it back in future versions. Instead later I saw the Zynga people become worth billions with FarmVille. Well, I can hope in some indirect way we contributed to current educational and free software successes by example.

Anyway, I hope for a "basic income" for all someday so all people who want to make creative endeavors like free educational software have the time to do so, individually or collectively.

The vast majority of those killed by drone strike are terrorists, not innocent people. No, a drone strike isn't terrorism.

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

Previous art exists: Mad magazine from 1979
Am I really that old that I remember seeing the original

That temperature affects violence, according to many studies?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/hot-weather-violence/

Solution: move everyone to cold places!