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Protests Mount In New Zealand Against New Surveillance Laws

An anonymous reader writes "New revelations about Ministerial orders requiring backdoors into online services in New Zealand are fueling nationwide protests against new surveillance powers to be granted to the Government Communications Services Bureau. Speaking at one large protest meeting, Kim Dotcom described the 'Five Eyes' X-Keyscore surveillance system as 'Google for spies'. He told protesters he first noticed he was being spied on when his internet speed slowed by '20 to 30 milliseconds'. 'As a gamer, I noticed,' he said."

6 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. John Key walking out when questioned about spying by schneidafunk · · Score: 5, Informative
    --
    Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
  2. Re: I can tell from the pixels by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    are you perhaps retarded?

    not only is that kind of delay noticeable by anyone with a bit of experience with networks, Kim Dotcom had FIBER OPTIC CABLE INSTALLED WITH 1-HOP ACCESS TO SUBSEA CABLES.

    A 20ms increase in latency would be a WTF is wrong with our hundred-million dollar infrastructure, not just a gamer who felt he had too high latency as an excuse for bad KDR.

  3. Re:I can tell from the pixels by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dotcom's claims of noticing an extra 20ms 'as a gamer' rather than 'as somebody looking at the ping displayed next to various multiplayer serves' are somewhat dubious; but there are a few additional details to his story.

    Apparently, as a major Modern Warfare 3 enthusiast, and living at more or less the far end of the earth, Dotcom took his ping pretty seriously and had a dedicated line installed from his house to the peering exchange in Auckland's Sky Tower. When his ping increased, he pulled customer support in to sort it out and they determined that his connection had picked up a few extra hops within NZ.

  4. Re:20-30 ms is massive by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?

    Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.

  5. Re:20-30 ms is massive by 1s44c · · Score: 4, Informative

    He runs servers. People who run servers often have some idea of the ping time to them. I know the ping time to my servers from home even though I can't react at super-human speeds, catch bullets in my teeth, fire lasers from my eyes, or anything of that nature.

  6. Re:I can tell from the pixels by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.

    I can't tell if you are trying to reference when this actually happened in the Cold War or not, but figured either way I should include a link for people who didn't know that toilet paper theft was really a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tamarisk.