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WiFi sniffing was not to collect personal data. It was a 20% project to get an idea of what sort of traffic was on WiFis these days. No one ever looked at the actual data, and none of the data ever left the lab.

It shouldn't have been collected, and it was recognized as a privacy concern but they went ahead with it anyways. Google then lied about it by saying it was a "mistake" and "unintentional". They then asked the FCC to black out embarrassing findings that contradicted their public statements: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

Not deleting email was just a matter of the way data is replicated in the datacenters.

Deleting it is just a matter of replicating the deletion.

The Buzz fiasco was just a mistake.

I'm seeing this excuse a lot. That's quite a "mistake" to make.

I don't see how Google was abusing a loophole when the 2009 Google code was written two years before the 2011 loophole was written.

Reference? I did a search for: "google safari 2009 2011 cookies" and didn't find what you are talking about.

And as for keeping data for too long, I don't know what you are talking about. Generally, Google likes to get rid of that stuff as soon as possible.

Believe me, I'm even more baffled by your comment. Google hoards information, as their whole business is based on knowing as much as possible. I have no idea where you got this idea that Google likes to throw away data: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/google-keeps-your-data-to-learn-from-good-guys-fight-off-bad-guys/

As for pervasive tracking, all google cares about is what sort of car you like. They could care less about any actual personal data.

But governments, hackers, and misbehaving employees do.

Tax havens are an unfortunate fact of life. All big companies have to do it. Fix the loopholes and level the playing field. Don't expect individual company to drop their competitive edge when the other companies aren't.

I've already addressed this in another comment.

Welcome to the real world.

Well, duh, that was my entire point. In the real world Google is a for-profit company that will ultimately act in their self-interest and not according to the angelic standards some think they follow.

I wish people would upgrade but most including yourself, my family, and most client sites have no reason to switch from XP.

Equipment, intranet apps, and other things being right now in 2012 only work on XP. People resistant to change and the comments down here show that are average Joes are astounding! My pessimism grows but hell, it might help do support more after 2014 if they keep getting infected. That means more demand which means more money just like what webmasters charge for IE 6 development these days.

Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.

Read Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez for some of the best use of this technology I have seen in recent fiction. Noting, of course, that Google was credited on the project (along with others)...

This page also discusses the technology used in the books.

This page and this page are examples of the sort of dialogue ensuing from these books. Everyone I have suggested them to is now dreaming of life in D-Space. ;)

What is amazing is that he wrote the first book in 2004 and saw so much of this coming... It reminds me of Ender's Game and its predictions of the common use of tablets, web forums, anytime/anywhere connectivity, adaptive learning systems, etc... even though it was written in the 80s.

I have never understood why prisoners should be forbidden from using an *offline* computer.

Actually, they're not, at least in California. I personally know several inmates who are taking college courses "behind bars." The computers aren't Internet-connected, and the instructor collects the flash drives they store their work on between classes, but they have access to computers for educational purposes. Some inmate clerks also have access to computers (non-networked) for typing and other clerical tasks.

In the federal system, they're even experimenting with the very limited and locked down TRULINCS email system for inmates...

What's not accurate is the summary's claim that "prison regulations forbid any contact with the outside world." Inmates routinely contact the outside world through telephone calls, letters, and contact and/or non-contact (and in California and New York, for most inmates, the possibility of "family" a/k/a "trailer" a/k/a/ "conjugal") visits...

On a related topic, anyone remember the Wired article on Roy Wahlberg? "Roy Wahlberg hacked a man to death, then hacked his way into a million-dollar software business behind bars."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/code_pr.html

As that older article points out, the Bakers also spent some time early on at IBM Research doing speech stuff (and from when I was working at the IBM Speech group myself much later, it did not seem completely clear what way most of the knowledge was flowing). My undergrad adviser at Princeton, George A. Miller, who did a lot in the psychology of natural language and knew the Bakers (I think from when he was at Rockefeller with them), told me about this loss more than a decade ago, as a cautionary tale. More than the money, what really hurt most for the couple was not being able to work on their project anymore. For anyone who really cares about what they are working on, this is a good argument for working in the free and open source software realm rather than trying to finance proprietary software somehow, even when you think you are the "owner" of the software. Imagine if the Bakers had released Dragon as FOSS back then and built a consultancy around it -- at least they would not be alienated from their 20+ year labor of love (or "third child" as they called the software). In general, you also can't expect the same people who put their love into creating great things for the world to be fully prepared to deal with business sharks (even business sharks like GS being supposedly hired to "help" them). I'm glad my wife and I released our own labors of love (like our Garden Simulator and PlantStudio software) as FOSS instead of taking on investors and making it proprietary, since at least we can always still work with the source code. Of course, the flip side of that is often not having the time to do that because of a need to do other things for money. We ideally need a "basic income" and similar social changes to solve that problem and to minimize a software industry based around "artificial scarcity".
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/

So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/08/freeman-dyson-m/

Emily White violated the copyrights on the music she acquired ("I've swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo"). You'd think RMS would be against that, since the GPL expresses (admirable IMO) restrictions on what you can do with it under those same copyright laws. His arguments why Emily "did nothing wrong" are mostly the lame tired shit piracy apologists have trotted out for decades now

After all, how can we support musicians? Buying recordings from record companies won't do it. For nearly all records, the musicians get none of that money; the record companies keep it. See this article and this article.

Untrue. Artist royalties are often ~20% of the sales price; this chart says $.09 for an iTunes download, and artists self-releasing through CD Baby keep 75%. The meme that artists don't get money seems to be a deliberate misunderstanding of the money record companies advance against royalties so artists can make a quality record (The Trichordist explains this well). Regardless of the percentage it is not the consumer's right or job to decide if that's a reasonable or obscene deal from the record company and online store. FFS, if you don't like a song enough to pay $0.99 for an unprotected DRM-free legal copy of it so the artist gets some money in exchange for your enjoyment of her creative endeavor:

1. Skip it and enjoy the zillions of free songs out there — under CC share licenses, out-of-copyright, in the public domain, live performances from trade-friendly artists on Internet Archive, etc.! As RMS knows from software, there are great free alternatives to restricted paid works, so go support those!

2. If you whine "Waahhh, this song I want ought to be free like all those others" so you pirate it anyway, your parents raised you badly.

RMS goes on

Practically speaking, the only effective and ethical way you could support musicians was through concerts.

Not true. Paying for the copyrighted recordings you want and love works great and delivers money to artists so they can make more! It's insulting to suggest artists should instead try to collect money for something completely different — "touring and T-shirts&quot. (No Sgt. Pepper for you, John Paul George and Ringo are going deaf on another tour that only their teenybopper fans attend.) The idea that artists should not charge for a quality studio recording has been immensely damaging to "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the area of recorded music, it's a big reason why today's songs are made on laptops instead of with crack session musicians. And as RMS later acknowledges, touring doesn't even work for those bands that do perform live, because they can't afford to travel to all their fans, then on any night only a fraction of fans in an area make it to the show.

RMS is on better ground with the first of his two ways to support artists

Put a tax on Internet connectivity, and divide the money among artists.

Great idea, let's hope it happens. But his second is a fantasy:

Give each player device a button to send 50 cents anonymously to the artists.

It's been tried, the Fairtunes service during Napster's golden era. I ponied up money for a song I shared, but in several y

This is an industry wide problem that has been known for a long time, and is just recently receiving wider attention. For example, Wired had two articles on this topic in January alone. The SCADA/controls industry really needs to get their act together

This is an industry wide problem that has been known for a long time, and is just recently receiving wider attention. For example, Wired had two articles on this topic in January alone. The SCADA/controls industry really needs to get their act together

They can't design a battery or display with parts that are replaceable without tearing apart glued components in an irreversible way? The new MacBook Pros aren't as repairable, apparently. It's fine to have products that are recyclable, but "reuse" comes before "recycle" for a reason, and "reuse" isn't possible if you can't easily fix something that is broken without wholesale replacement of major, expensive components.

From this link http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ispplan.pdf

Subsequent alerts may include notifications in the form of pop-ups or redirection
to a special page displaying the alert. Failure to respond to these alerts will lead
to additional steps designed to ensure that the account comes into compliance.
These steps, referred to as “Mitigation Measures,” might include, for example:
temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the
subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some
educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may
deem necessary to help resolve the matter. These steps will only be taken after
multiple alerts and a failure by the subscriber to respond. This system consists of
at least five alerts.

I don't see how that's going to work at all. Wouldn't most modern browsers block popups, especially those not at all affiliated with the target site? Wouldn't most third-party DNS providers warn you of a redirection as some kind of hostile activity? Wouldn't a NoScript (or similar) browser also defeat some/all of these "notification" methods?

Verizon tried this already in 2003. It was a pretty cool idea, because they already had the phone booth real estate, and the presence of telephones at each one meant that they could use their existing DSL infrastructure for backhaul.

Fast forward to 2012. Wifi is in far greater demand now than it was nine years ago, now that everyone's got tablets and other devices. Perhaps it is an idea whose time has come. However there will be stiff competition, particularly from cable companies in suburban areas where the wires are overhead. Many cable companies are now deploying thousands of devices that look like this on the wires. They're Wi-Fi hot spots with built in cable modems. Once the density gets high enough, subscribers are likely to find one in nearly every public place they find themselves in.

Somehow I doubt the NSA has such infrastucture.

If they don't yet, they sure as hell will soon

Well, until MS explains what the NSAKey does, I'll just assume the worst.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000520001558/http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/backdoor.asp

You could have stopped assuming the worst over a decade ago. If you really think that the NSA would allow its back door to carry such an obvious name, then you need to get your head checked. Here is the sort of back door I might be willing to attribute to the NSA, but even this seems a little too obvious:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/11/securitymatters_1115

I remember reading this article on the subject:
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_02ac

Remember that these parental filters are voluntary. Much worse filtering - one that western people are creating themselves - is called Google Filter Bubble.

What is Google filter bubble

I'm glad you asked. It's a filter you're creating to yourself without thinking. It's a bubble you're creating around yourself, letting only your opinions and knowledge ever reach you. Everything else is censored.

Big Deal this was done already. http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2002/01/49716 the kid did texting but that could just of easily been speaking. I call prior art on this one! And this kid also got a 103,000$ scholarship out of the idea! (from 2002)

Now lets just make the price affordable. Hey were is the Kickstarter on this!

A few years there was a great story in Wired about breaking locks. In summary, even the world's most secure locks are not meant to survive more than 10-15 minutes. And it tells the story of a few experts that broke down one of these locks in under a minute. 3 minutes on a car lock? Either the hackers haven't figured out the best way to break in yet or the security is actually amazing. Wired story

It's five in the morning here and I am in no mood to be charitable.

The lawsuit was initiated by the children's grandmother. Their legal guardian. Her lawyers are working pro bono.

No fees. No slice of the pie. Got that?

Moving on.

Reiser is defending himself.

In a way, he is always defending himself. Reiser, it seems, can do no wrong.

He is the one who asked the judge to drag the kids into court.

"Why?" you ask.

What he wanted to do was to draw them into a grandiose scheme to promote his new and improved conspiracy theories and defense for the murder. The judge isn't playing along.

He claims his wife was abusing the kids, that she had Factitious disorder by proxy --- often referred to as Munchausen syndrome by proxy --- where a caregiver harms or even kills someone they are in charge of in order to gain sympathy and attention. During the 2008 trial, Reiser alluded to that as well, accusing his wife of having the disease when she wanted to get their son surgery for severe hearing loss.

In the unlawful death case, he now says why: ''I defended my children from harm.'' He added that, by murdering his wife, ''I stopped multiple felonies by doing so.''

In his papers, he accuses the courts, the prison system, county children's services, his trial attorneys and others of conspiring against him, during his murder trial and now in the civil case.

''There are extensive legal grounds under multiple arguments for defending an innocent child when the state will not, at the cost of a non-innocent party's life,'' Hans Reiser wrote.

Convicted of Murder, Linux Guru Hans Reiser Returns to Court to Fight Civil Suit

"Wired" has it all, in Reiser's own handwriting.

More.

The beginning of Monday's trial was marked by impatience from the judge and the children's legal team. The complaint against Reiser was originally filed in August 2008 by the children's maternal grandmother and legal guardian, Irina Sharanova. The case has been stalled as Reiser filed various motions to delay proceedings and claimed that he has not had adequate access to his legal documents while at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga.

''This trial has been pending for a really long time,'' said Judge Dennis Hayashi about the pretrial claims. ''I also made it clear that I'm not delaying this any further. ... We need to move on.''

Reiser, dressed in his orange prison uniform and appearing antsy at Hayashi's denials, has subpoenaed his children to appear in court.

They are living in Russia with Sharanova and are not expected at the trial, [Sharanova's attorney] said.

"I personally don't think it would do the children any good to come here and testify in this trial,"

"They'd have to relive what they went through as very young children."

Both of the children were at their father's house in the Montclair district when the killing is believed to have taken place.

Jury selection begins in Hans Reiser civil trial

According to wired, the lawyers are working pro bono on this.

You are absolutely correct. I have not used Windows 8. It was pretty clear from my post that I have not. Indeed, I was quoting from an opinion piece. From Wired. I even gave the link . And I did add at the end of my post the caveat: "Hopefully 8 will offer a way for those adapted ADDs among us to jump around as per usual..." Glad to see it does. Shame on Mr Thompson, the author of the Wired piece, for not mentioning, or at least not properly highlighting, the fact that there is a way to reconfigure Win 8 to do multitasking. Since an upgrade from XP is expected to be very reasonable in price, and Windows 8 is meant to be pretty snappy, that is good news. I was wondering why MS chose to cripple their OS. Wondering no more. Thanks for hands on info.

After all in a multi tasking OS if you do not want to multitask you simply don't open any other apps and stay with what you are doing. Then, well, you are single tasking. I agree that it would be a bad move for Microsoft to limit thier new OS. However, I just finished reading this article in Wired that claims that is exactly what Win 8 Metro does. It is apparently a poor environment in which to do multi tasking. It seems odd to restrict the user to one app at a time, as on a phone, essentially creating a "smartphone" like environment on the PC desktop which -- unlike a phone -- has the hardware to support many running applications. People who do a lot of multitasking will probably not like Metro. Limiting multi-tasking seems like a downgrade to me. Or as I said in my post a "dumbgrade." Hopefully 8 will offer a way for those adapted ADDs among us to jump around as per usual...

Oh, wait. A win messenger pop-up. It's my old pal 5eX-T0i from Kiev. Gotta run. Ciao.

ISPs don't care about your privacy actually, they never did!

Cable laying is part of the plot in Cryptonomicon, but besides that Stephenson wrote a (very) long article in Wired 4.12 back in 1996:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

"The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth."

Entertaining and full of info, a must read if you are at all curious about cable laying.

Well you could throw it away (tell me which dumpster you leave it in please, or you could pay $129-$199 for Apple to replace the battery for you so that it's brand new again.

http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro/service/battery/

Doesn't seem like that pice is entirely out to lunch unless you shop the cheap 3rd party batteries for laptops. The OEM ones I've seen are generally around $100 anyway. Your call.

Here is the link to prove you can't ever change the battery.

All I can say is wow

John the Ripper now able to crack office files and use GPUs

4 July 2012, 12:38

http://h-online.com/-1631901

"Version 1.7.9-jumbo-6 of the John the Ripper password cracker sees significant format support enhancements. The open source tool is now able to crack password-protected office documents (Office 2007/2010 and OpenDocument) and Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey master passwords, as well as WPA-PSK keys and Mac OS X keychains. It can also request to use GPUs via CUDA and OpenCL. The suffix "jumbo" appears to be intended literally â" more than 40,000 lines of code have been added in the six months since the previous release.

Developer Solar Designer told The H's associates at heise Security that, in developing GPU support, the focus has been on modern functions which can be slow to calculate, such as WPA-PSK and Unix password hashes. For some functions, such as Ubuntu's standard hash function (sha512crypt) and the time-consuming bcrypt, there were, according to the developers, no crackers with GPU support until now, "because others were unhappy about releasing a tool with 'non-impressive' speed numbers, even if this is desirable in practice".

In the case of sha512crypt, this means that the GPU on a GeForce GTX 570 graphics card can generate around 11,000 hashes per second â" still more than five times faster than on a computer with eight CPU cores. By comparison, for SHA1 hashes, with GPU support this figure would normally be in the millions. For bcrypt, a graphics card just beats an eight-core system by a hair's breadth â" in both cases the maximum figure is around 5,000 hashes. The inability of GPUs to realise speed gains with bcrypt is due to the algorithm's design, which is very memory intensive. According to Solar Designer, the developers were primarily concerned with finding out just how slow the bcrypt implementation would be."

- http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2012/06/29/1
- http://www.openwall.com/john/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt
- http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/vsygc/john_the_ripper_179jumbo6_adds_gpu_support/
- http://www.h-online.com/news/item/Cracking-DES-faster-with-John-the-Ripper-1273585.html
* http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/John-the-Ripper-now-able-to-crack-office-files-and-use-GPUs-1631901.html

crve@h-online.com
Copyright © 2012 Heise Media UK Ltd.

###
Sensitive Information Security Sources and Breaches

Unauthorized disclosures of secrets are essential for democracy.

In response to Wikileaks background inquiries Cryptome offers that there are hundreds of online and offline sources of sensitive information security breaches which preceded Wikileaks beginning about 120 years ago. This outline traces the conflict between technological capabilities for sensitive information breaches and control by law enforcement when technical countermeasures are insufficient -- a few examples among many others worldwide:

http://cryptome.org/0002/siss.htm
####
Feds Look to Fight Leaks With âFog of Disinformationâ(TM)

http://cryptogon.com/?p=30257

July 4th, 2012

Via: Danger Room:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/fog-computing/all/

Malaysia? Korea? Japan!? Whew! Hopefully the #TPP Agreement will be in place by the time this MEGA Time Dotcom link comes on-line. Citizens might just think about downloading copyrighted material over this backbone! Well... if not, at least the Japanese will rot in jail for killing the Creative Industry!

John the Ripper now able to crack office files and use GPUs

4 July 2012, 12:38

http://h-online.com/-1631901

"Version 1.7.9-jumbo-6 of the John the Ripper password cracker sees significant format support enhancements. The open source tool is now able to crack password-protected office documents (Office 2007/2010 and OpenDocument) and Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey master passwords, as well as WPA-PSK keys and Mac OS X keychains. It can also request to use GPUs via CUDA and OpenCL. The suffix "jumbo" appears to be intended literally â" more than 40,000 lines of code have been added in the six months since the previous release.

Developer Solar Designer told The H's associates at heise Security that, in developing GPU support, the focus has been on modern functions which can be slow to calculate, such as WPA-PSK and Unix password hashes. For some functions, such as Ubuntu's standard hash function (sha512crypt) and the time-consuming bcrypt, there were, according to the developers, no crackers with GPU support until now, "because others were unhappy about releasing a tool with 'non-impressive' speed numbers, even if this is desirable in practice".

In the case of sha512crypt, this means that the GPU on a GeForce GTX 570 graphics card can generate around 11,000 hashes per second â" still more than five times faster than on a computer with eight CPU cores. By comparison, for SHA1 hashes, with GPU support this figure would normally be in the millions. For bcrypt, a graphics card just beats an eight-core system by a hair's breadth â" in both cases the maximum figure is around 5,000 hashes. The inability of GPUs to realise speed gains with bcrypt is due to the algorithm's design, which is very memory intensive. According to Solar Designer, the developers were primarily concerned with finding out just how slow the bcrypt implementation would be."

- http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2012/06/29/1
- http://www.openwall.com/john/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt
- http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/vsygc/john_the_ripper_179jumbo6_adds_gpu_support/
- http://www.h-online.com/news/item/Cracking-DES-faster-with-John-the-Ripper-1273585.html
* http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/John-the-Ripper-now-able-to-crack-office-files-and-use-GPUs-1631901.html

crve@h-online.com
Copyright © 2012 Heise Media UK Ltd.

####
Sensitive Information Security Sources and Breaches

Unauthorized disclosures of secrets are essential for democracy.

In response to Wikileaks background inquiries Cryptome offers that there are hundreds of online and offline sources of sensitive information security breaches which preceded Wikileaks beginning about 120 years ago. This outline traces the conflict between technological capabilities for sensitive information breaches and control by law enforcement when technical countermeasures are insufficient -- a few examples among many others worldwide:

http://cryptome.org/0002/siss.htm
####
Feds Look to Fight Leaks With âFog of Disinformationâ(TM)

http://cryptogon.com/?p=30257

July 4th, 2012

Via: Danger Room:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/fog-computing/all

This is reminiscent of the original standards battle between AC vs DC distribution systems.. monolithic centralized infrastructure vs distributed regional systems. You remember the one where Edison electrocuted an elephant.

Anyways the pendulum goes back and forth on these things, and if period doubling is occurring that means that fine grained rapid deployment is required to keep pace with that. Won't be long before data centres are riding electric trains, semi-trucks (a la Walmart's warehouse on wheels model) or even public transit busses with high speed datalinks to physically shorten that last mile.

Why is Google so interested in autonomous vehicles anyways? Could it be something do with an inevitable trajectory towards automated containerized data centre deployment? After all, there is a similarity with a third world concept where poverty drives innovation. So really shouldn't the discussion be about graphing costs of data delivery vs cost of caching & updating?

So there's no reason to go to Best Buy. To get a better deal on a TV, check Amazon or Walmart. To get a better deal on an appliance, go to Lowe's or Menards or Sam's Club. Want a better selection of movies, games, or music? Amazon.

Screw Best Buy, with their overpriced products and ripoff "services". Plus, the Geek Squad is mostly known for screwing up customer's machines and stealing software.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=geek%20squad%20screwed%20me&oq=&gs_l=&pbx=1&fp=54147a6c24560a3&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1599&bih=963
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2007/05/geek_squad_caug/

They've done it before. They were pretty successful, too.

How soon we nerds forget Scientology's war against the internet back in the day.

khipu laid out plenty of facts and 2 minutes crawling the net would confirm everything he says.

How much data do you need? If you need everything referencing, here's about 5 minutes worth:

Healthcare cop-out:

Cut a secret deal to kill the public option, while campaigning on its behalf
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/ny-times-reporter-confirm_b_500999.html

Cut a deal to exempt abortion services from health care reform
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/21/deal-struck-on-abortion-clears-path-for-health-care-passage/

Pushed for a 5 year prison term for Charles Lynch, the operator of a medical marijuana dispensary, legal under California law
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/21/BA1V175SB9.DTL

Granted waivers for 30 companies, including McDonald's, exempting them from health care reform
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2010-10-07-healthlaw07_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Warmonger:

Sent 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8389778.stm

Successfully protected Bush officials from prosecution for torture
http://washingtonindependent.com/33985/in-torture-cases-obama-toes-bush-line

Proposed a three year freeze on domestic spending, exempting cuts from the Pentagon and Homeland Security
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/obama-allies-struggle-to_n_436996.html

Argued that the widespread use of Predator drones is a justifiable form of self-defense
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/03/drone-attacks-legit-self-defense-says-administration-lawyer/

Revived "Prompt Global Strike" weapons system, considered too controversial by Bush Administration
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/obama-revives-rumsfeld-era-missile-scheme/

Backed off on his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Extended the Patriot Act without making any reforms
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0301/Obama-signs-Patriot-Act-extension-without-reforms

Cronyism:

Violated his own ban on lobbyists working for the administration
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/promise/240/tougher-rules-against-revolving-door-for-lobbyists/

Sided with utility companies in lawsuit to stop greenhouse gas emissions
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/08/26/obama-stance-on-climate-suit-stuns-allies/

Gave permits to BP and other oil companies, exempting them from environmental protection laws
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14agency.html

Appointed Lawrence Summers as his top economic advise

khipu laid out plenty of facts and 2 minutes crawling the net would confirm everything he says.

How much data do you need? If you need everything referencing, here's about 5 minutes worth:

Healthcare cop-out:

Cut a secret deal to kill the public option, while campaigning on its behalf
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/ny-times-reporter-confirm_b_500999.html

Cut a deal to exempt abortion services from health care reform
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/21/deal-struck-on-abortion-clears-path-for-health-care-passage/

Pushed for a 5 year prison term for Charles Lynch, the operator of a medical marijuana dispensary, legal under California law
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/21/BA1V175SB9.DTL

Granted waivers for 30 companies, including McDonald's, exempting them from health care reform
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2010-10-07-healthlaw07_ST_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Warmonger:

Sent 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8389778.stm

Successfully protected Bush officials from prosecution for torture
http://washingtonindependent.com/33985/in-torture-cases-obama-toes-bush-line

Proposed a three year freeze on domestic spending, exempting cuts from the Pentagon and Homeland Security
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/obama-allies-struggle-to_n_436996.html

Argued that the widespread use of Predator drones is a justifiable form of self-defense
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/03/drone-attacks-legit-self-defense-says-administration-lawyer/

Revived "Prompt Global Strike" weapons system, considered too controversial by Bush Administration
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/obama-revives-rumsfeld-era-missile-scheme/

Backed off on his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Extended the Patriot Act without making any reforms
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0301/Obama-signs-Patriot-Act-extension-without-reforms

Cronyism:

Violated his own ban on lobbyists working for the administration
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/promise/240/tougher-rules-against-revolving-door-for-lobbyists/

Sided with utility companies in lawsuit to stop greenhouse gas emissions
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/08/26/obama-stance-on-climate-suit-stuns-allies/

Gave permits to BP and other oil companies, exempting them from environmental protection laws
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14agency.html

Appointed Lawrence Summers as his top economic advise

Please don't link to multi-page TFAs in your submission. Link to the one with all pages, or print view if available. These days, that seems to be the only way online articles are readable on otherwise overweight websites.

Please don't link to multi-page TFAs in your submission. Link to the one with all pages, or print view if available. These days, that seems to be the only way online articles are readable on otherwise overweight websites.

Lab grown diamonds can be made at a price per carat about $5.

Source:
Wired article: "The New Diamond Age"
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond_pr.html

Wearable computers simply aren't happening. What, your password is in your other pants? About the only rational possibility for them would be some sort of hilariously terrible glasses-equivalent. While that'd make DBZ geeks happy (WHAT DOES THE SCOUTER SAY?!?!?), such an interface would be a disaster from the usability - not to mention, sanity - standpoint.

This.

Just look at how poorly bluetooth does.

Bluetooth headsets have been around for what, at least 10 years now, long before phones were smart, and I still rarely see someone using a bluetooth headset, most people are still holding the phone to their ear, even at times when they shouldn't be like while driving. And at less than $20 they're not expensive, they're just not popular.

So they claim we're all going to have wearable computers, any day now, when they can't even get the average person to use a $20 bluetooth headset? Really?

And let's not even mention that more than half of a smartphone's size is due to the battery to run it. So where does that large battery go on wearable computers? Or are we all going to have to suffer with a ~2 hr battery life?

This google team is so out of touch with reality it's not even funny. Will this technology be available to average consumers someday? Sure. Will it "look unusual and awkward when we view someone holding an object in their hand and looking down at it (in three to five years)"? No.

Wow! And the new NSA data center that's-so-big-the-town-they're-building-it-in-had-to-expand-its-boundaries in Utah isn't even online yet! Just imagine how infrequently they'll need to bother the courts after it opens next year. Eventually judges may be able to go back to their original mission of hearing cases, unmolested by the petty need to approve wiretaps.

Admitted wiretaps have dropped.

But not the other kind

Manning used a CD-RW, because USB Flash devices were already banned because of this.

Like many technology items, the Navy contracts them out. HP got a sweet no-bid contract extention (HP bought EDS which originally bid it). Since then they have been charging the tax payer over $2000 a year to provide network connectivity... for EACH WORKSTATION.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/02/navy-internet/

In theory the Navy is supposed to start rolling their own stuff, but my guess is since this is on slashdot HP is going to make a big stink about it and shut it down.

Like many technology items, the Navy contracts them out. HP got a sweet no-bid contract extention (HP bought EDS which originally bid it). Since then they have been charging the tax payer over $2000 a year to provide network connectivity... for EACH WORKSTATION.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/02/navy-internet/

In theory the Navy is supposed to start rolling their own stuff, but my guess is since this is on slashdot HP is going to make a big stink about it and shut it down.

Actually that just changed this week. They aren't saying that Macs can get viruses but they are no longer claiming that Macs don't get PC viruses, which is a pretty weird statement to begin with. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/mac_viruses/

Don't miss the point that Apple is very enterprise friendly including remote wipe. Enterprises can even set up their own app stores. And VMWare is hoping to virtualize your iPhone so that your business stuff is completely separate from your personal stuff.

It sounds to me like you've bought into sci-fi writer David Brin's theories on "sousveillance" uncritically, and are ignoring Bruce Schneier's debunking of Brin's myth of the transparent society in this Wired article. For what it is worth, cops can already seize recording equipment from by-standers at a crime scene; I don't think giving everybody a camera is going to change that. What I think is far more likely to happen is that the government will attempt to maintain their asymmetric (I'm thinking you meant asymmetric, not asynchronous) advantage by minimizing a citizen's ability to record cops/firefighters/soldiers, either legislatively or technologically. Ironically, this legislation, if I'm right, will probably be passed in the name of maintaining privacy. It's already illegal to publish photos of dead US soldiers being returned to the US for interment -- and that was done by an executive order issued by Bush II and reaffirmed by Obama. The technology already exists to disrupt communications -- selectively blanking cell and wi-fi transmissions over arbitrary areas is trivial to accomplish and DHS has policies and procedures in place to control information in emergencies, something they inherited from FEMA.

Anyone else remember the story of the Iranian concrete from a while back? Read about how much it blew away the competition at a concrete strength contest and brought the issue to light. 50-60k PSI concrete failure strength is just insane.

Link

Quick summary: Security on the drones has a history of bad decisions, such as unencrypted video feeds and malware. Breaking GPS encryption would be almost impossible, but it's quite possible that the drones were programmed to use unencrypted GPS as a fallback if encrypted GPS was lost, so if Iran jammed only the encrypted GPS signal, the plane would rely on spoofed unencrypted GPS. The short answer: it would have been tough, and we don't know whether they really did it or not, but it's not as impossible as people are making it out to be.

"Three attackers drove a van through the front of Microsoftâ(TM)s offices just north of Athens on Wednesday, marched out security guards at gunpoint, and tried to burn the building to the ground.

        Itâ(TM)s unclear who is behind the attack, but itâ(TM)s a worrying sign for foreign multinational corporations, coming as Greece struggles under the weight of a collapsing economy."

        Continued:
        http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/microsoft_greece/

Yes, yes they do.

It was just last month I was reading about it. Again.

Or is it that they only want this access for themselves and you're a tairist if you don't think the FBI should have all access to all your activities and communications.