I don't think that if the system the OP described really exists then it's actual humans sitting and listening to random calls/emails. It would be a computer, matching words and looking for frequencies/patterns. Only after being flagged you'd be assigned a human operator.
I don't know why you think that mobile or email is necessarily "local". Mobile goes through central switches just like POTS, and 99% of email sticks out like a sore thumb flying around on 110/25 totally in the clear. Put a few machines on major peer exchanges and you could vacuum up 80%+ of landline, mobile and public email then send them to anywhere in the world. And remember it doesn't have to be realtime.
I don't know about Skype, being somewhat paranoid myself I've paid some attention to where it's sending its packets when I talk to someone I know. Looks to me like the only voice-like packets it sends are to the remote peer. But who knows what tricks the closed source, heavily obfuscated Skype client could be playing.
And you say that you're not worried about the govt. spying, just that the employees they have might be stupid? I don't see how you can separate the two. Anything the government decides to do *will* be carried out by those low-pay jobsworths. It's one and the same.
James Bond and Jack Ryan are fictional characters. In reality, when you give the government this kind of power, you get the DHS and the TSA. I think I'd rather keep my privacy and take my chances with Ahmed, thanks. Hell, let me concealed carry when I fly and I'll protect the whole plane for free, no eavesdropping necessary - how's that for a bargain!
But no, that would be the intelligent, freedom-loving way.. can't have that.
As someone with some experience in data mining, any number of solutions to that kind of problem spring to mind. I don't have any inside knowledge on phone monitoring but you could:
- weight words for context. "bomb"by itself might be a +1 but not if it's behind "is the" or there's been a mention of [all popular games/maps from those games/other keywords from those games]. - does the phone call begin with "salam" (persian for "hello") or use any other arab (or whatever) words - if you can get a transcript, you can mine for topics very accurately. think of what google does.. and remember the main problem with google is people gaming it for profit.. doesn't happen on phone calls
That's just off the top of my head. If you have enough seed data, you can build amazingly accurate tools to get what you want from large amounts of data. And what better seed data than the public internet? Hell, if you were just picking word frequencies, just feed in a large game forum or twenty as "negative" examples and you will largely negate the "gamer problem".
You would be amazed how accurate you can get this kind of thing if you have reasonably clean data. 99.9% of phone calls would be "clean", ie not intentionally spoofing the system. That would just make the 0.1% of people who did try and mislead the system stand out all the more.
I don't know if they're listening like the OP says but if they are, I wouldn't rely on the "signal vs noise" theory. Generally the govt/defence is incompetent but all it takes is one smart person for it to actually work pretty well.
And by the way, a lot of people are on those no-fly lists with no idea how they got on. You said it like it's a reductio ad absurdum in these disgraceful times it wouldn't surprise me at all...
Thanks for wasting my time with the worthless comment, AC. And please stop calling yourself an Atheist - you give the rest of us a bad name.
"Love" is more fun than busting heads, is it? Well why don't you go write your new ultra-fun love-themed video game, you'll be a billionaire in no time.
As a former network admin, i'd bet quite a large sum of money that in the majority of cases, the password the user chooses for the new site registration and the password they're using for email - probably the same email they gave for the signup! - are identical anyway.
This is just asking permission. Nine out of ten times, they've already got the information.
Still don't like it. The real solution is for the mail providers to provide a secondary authentication measure to provide information from a users' account, like calendar or address book info, without giving away their password.. wider adoption of OpenID could be part of the solution to this problem.
Was that Apple's security is fantastic! Seriously, they went to all that trouble, asked for submissions, publicised it far and wide.. and that's the best they can come up with? It was like SCO and their "mountains" of code.
What was the score again? A couple of crashing bugs, only one of them remote, and that one didn't work 95% of the time (I sure wasn't able to duplicate it). Most of the "Apple Bugs" were 3rd party, and while they were admittedly running on the Apple platform, we can hardly blame Apple themselves for 3rd party bugs. Needless to say they were almost all immediately fixed, sometimes within hours.
The lesson I got from MOAB is that in general Apple's security is excellent. I'd love to see what a "Month of Windows Bugs" would unearth.. it would probably turn into a Year Of Windows Bugs, if not Decades Of Windows Bugs. Actually I take that back, there is a Decades Of Windows Bugs, it started in 1992 and it's still going strong!
I know a few entrepreneurial internet startup types. These are the guys who are creating the new economy, right now. Building innovative new services, mostly using the web. This area is the future, everyone knows it, and I fully expect some of my friends to be multi-multi-millionaires in the years to come.
Now if I were to suggest to these people - any of them, in fact - that they deploy on Windows, they would roll around on the floor laughing for a few minutes, before permanently writing me off as a complete idiot.
This is Microsoft's problem. They can fool the old guard for a while longer perhaps; no-one wants to do any large scale Exchange migrations anytime soon - not anyone who's ever tried before, anyway. But the new guard, all the innovation online, doesn't belong to them and moves further away every day. All the exciting new developments on the web are OSS and without even a single exception no-one I know would consider using anything else. Even those who still program on Windows wouldn't use it server-side.
So this marketing effort might pay off a few percentage points here and there as MS squeezes Joe Company's backroom for a few more Server 2003 licenses but the really big ship has already sailed, a long time ago. Can you name even a single new online service you're excited about that uses Windows? Even one? Thought not.
So hell, let them squeeze the old guard for all they're worth. The new platform, the web and the internet itself, has slipped through MS's fingers.. and that's why I don't worry about Microsoft anymore.
.. because it throws down the gauntlet to China. China's in the same position the USSR was a generation ago - proud, insecure, and eager - perhaps overeager - to demonstrate its "greatness". But unlike the USSR, they actually have the economic viability to mount a decent long-term challenge to the USA.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. America is a great country but it NEEDS a competitor. Without Russia to "compete against" the whole game has fallen apart, the US has lost its confidence, progress in "national pride" projects such as this grinds to a helpless standstill while the narrow-minded lefties whine about "the money could be best spent at home" and similar short-term thinking - and let's not even mention the miserable standstill in the middle east.
China is shaping up to be the new Russia for America - a capable, proud opponent who will catalyse any number of "races", some good, some bad. But any way you cut it, this can only be a good thing in the long term, and China certainly presents less of a threat than Russia.
Now if the Euros could get in on the action, we could have a three-way race to the stars, and progress in space technology will accelerate to a pace we can only dream of today, and about time.
Brilliant news, let's wait for China's response - that's what will really "lock it in".
I used to be a big Sony fan. My friends would make jokes about how much of a Sony fan I was - Sony TV, Sony monitor, Sony CD players and headphones. The whole deal. Not fanboy mind you, just a genuine fan of a great company.
About 5 years ago my opinion of them slowly began to sour, like a lot of peoples' it seems. And now, looking around me, I don't have any Sony stuff at all - I gave it all away during my natural cycle of replacements. My new generation of stereo equipment, for example, is heavily informed by the existence of iTunes & iPod, and where I once would have had nothing but Trinitron there's now Samsung and Apple.
So I've got pretty strong feelings about Sony. I used to love them, before they started going wrong. They used to be the best in so many categories, now I couldn't name any area in which I think they are. It's a kind of bitter feeling for me at least, watching a company you used to love go bad. I've often wondered about what really caused it.. buying that record company is high on the list of possibilities. Taking a king hit from Apple and/or Samsung that they never really recovered from, maybe. Or perhaps just inevitable corporate cultural decline. It's an interesting, but depressing, story.
But no matter how bitter I feel about them, I'll never dig this kind of overenthusiastic schadenfreude that I see here, gleefully revelling in every little misstep, like a bunch of stupid little brats in some playground. Sony used to be great. What's happened to them should be a sobering study in corporate cancer, not an opportunity for some cheap yuks at any possible bad news.
I think there's a lot of entrepreneurial wannabes here, maybe like me. Sony used to be the kind of company I aspired to. Maybe not realistically expecting to mirror their successes but, you know, "if I could have any company, it would be Sony" kind of deal. But now, seeing what's happening to them, I wonder if any company can keep its integrity or whether companies that get too big just inevitably rot from the inside, as seems to be happening here. I'd love to have intelligent discussions about what the hell went wrong at Sony, how and if other companies can avoid this kind of cancer, try to find the inflection points where decisions were made that were critically wrong in hindsight.
But fuck this childish mocking! Are there really people here who take actual pleasure in seeing once-great companies falter? If so, that's just pathetic.
It seems that Sony is not content with forcing hundreds of foreigners to wait in line, in the cold rain, just to earn a few dollars for food.. now it's taunting disappointed fans worldwide by pulling apart a perfectly good PS3, taking pictures of its wrecked insides, and just posting it on the web to get page views. Is this sickening snuff photography par for the course in this godless age, and will the degenerate hoots of paedophile basement-dwellers clicking furiously from one voyeuristic desecration to the next drown out the heart-wrenching sobs of the child you know whose Christmas dreams have been forever ruined because of this soulless, wretched visual excursion into the depths of Sony's capitalist depravity?"
Looks like the PS3's actual value is about $1.50 in plastic and metal. Nicely done.
Let me ask you a question my friend. Are you against the war on drugs?
Yes, of course you are. The war on drugs is stupid. Why bother targeting the suppliers, when everyone knows that people want drugs and they're going to get them one way or the other. It's obvious! Anyone with half a brain is against the war on drugs.
So why are you blaming the choices of the American people on Bush, Cheney, etc? Don't get me wrong, I can't stand Bush. But I'm sick of people blaming America's ills solely on him, just like they blame the drug problem on the dealers. I don't like dealers, I don't like Bush. But the people always get what they want.
America's problem is simple. The people are too rich, fat and lazy, and forgot the important principles of their country's founding. It is as simple as that. There is only one way the current trend will be reversed, and that's when all the soccer moms care deeply about their, and their country's, liberty. Do you think that's happening anytime soon?
You can blame Dubya all you want, but that's the easy way out. Make him a scapegoat all you want, but next election the people will just vote for someone even worse. If you want to solve the problem, you have to reach the people, and that's a much harder job than simply dissing Dubya. Personally I can't tell the difference between the GOP and the Dems anyway, besides a couple of minor talking points.. I don't see the Democrats pledging to disband the DHS and trash the no fly lists, do you?
I'm not American, but I also love your country (I'm Australian), and I am so sad to see this decline. And the worse thing is, where America leads, we will follow, as in everything else...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that if the system the OP described really exists then it's actual humans sitting and listening to random calls/emails. It would be a computer, matching words and looking for frequencies/patterns. Only after being flagged you'd be assigned a human operator.
.. can't have that.
I don't know why you think that mobile or email is necessarily "local". Mobile goes through central switches just like POTS, and 99% of email sticks out like a sore thumb flying around on 110/25 totally in the clear. Put a few machines on major peer exchanges and you could vacuum up 80%+ of landline, mobile and public email then send them to anywhere in the world. And remember it doesn't have to be realtime.
I don't know about Skype, being somewhat paranoid myself I've paid some attention to where it's sending its packets when I talk to someone I know. Looks to me like the only voice-like packets it sends are to the remote peer. But who knows what tricks the closed source, heavily obfuscated Skype client could be playing.
And you say that you're not worried about the govt. spying, just that the employees they have might be stupid? I don't see how you can separate the two. Anything the government decides to do *will* be carried out by those low-pay jobsworths. It's one and the same.
James Bond and Jack Ryan are fictional characters. In reality, when you give the government this kind of power, you get the DHS and the TSA. I think I'd rather keep my privacy and take my chances with Ahmed, thanks. Hell, let me concealed carry when I fly and I'll protect the whole plane for free, no eavesdropping necessary - how's that for a bargain!
But no, that would be the intelligent, freedom-loving way
As someone with some experience in data mining, any number of solutions to that kind of problem spring to mind. I don't have any inside knowledge on phone monitoring but you could:
.. and remember the main problem with google is people gaming it for profit .. doesn't happen on phone calls
...
- weight words for context. "bomb"by itself might be a +1 but not if it's behind "is the" or there's been a mention of [all popular games/maps from those games/other keywords from those games].
- does the phone call begin with "salam" (persian for "hello") or use any other arab (or whatever) words
- if you can get a transcript, you can mine for topics very accurately. think of what google does
That's just off the top of my head. If you have enough seed data, you can build amazingly accurate tools to get what you want from large amounts of data. And what better seed data than the public internet? Hell, if you were just picking word frequencies, just feed in a large game forum or twenty as "negative" examples and you will largely negate the "gamer problem".
You would be amazed how accurate you can get this kind of thing if you have reasonably clean data. 99.9% of phone calls would be "clean", ie not intentionally spoofing the system. That would just make the 0.1% of people who did try and mislead the system stand out all the more.
I don't know if they're listening like the OP says but if they are, I wouldn't rely on the "signal vs noise" theory. Generally the govt/defence is incompetent but all it takes is one smart person for it to actually work pretty well.
And by the way, a lot of people are on those no-fly lists with no idea how they got on. You said it like it's a reductio ad absurdum in these disgraceful times it wouldn't surprise me at all
Thanks for wasting my time with the worthless comment, AC. And please stop calling yourself an Atheist - you give the rest of us a bad name.
"Love" is more fun than busting heads, is it? Well why don't you go write your new ultra-fun love-themed video game, you'll be a billionaire in no time.
Idiot.
As a former network admin, i'd bet quite a large sum of money that in the majority of cases, the password the user chooses for the new site registration and the password they're using for email - probably the same email they gave for the signup! - are identical anyway.
.. wider adoption of OpenID could be part of the solution to this problem.
This is just asking permission. Nine out of ten times, they've already got the information.
Still don't like it. The real solution is for the mail providers to provide a secondary authentication measure to provide information from a users' account, like calendar or address book info, without giving away their password
Was that Apple's security is fantastic! Seriously, they went to all that trouble, asked for submissions, publicised it far and wide .. and that's the best they can come up with? It was like SCO and their "mountains" of code.
.. it would probably turn into a Year Of Windows Bugs, if not Decades Of Windows Bugs. Actually I take that back, there is a Decades Of Windows Bugs, it started in 1992 and it's still going strong!
What was the score again? A couple of crashing bugs, only one of them remote, and that one didn't work 95% of the time (I sure wasn't able to duplicate it). Most of the "Apple Bugs" were 3rd party, and while they were admittedly running on the Apple platform, we can hardly blame Apple themselves for 3rd party bugs. Needless to say they were almost all immediately fixed, sometimes within hours.
The lesson I got from MOAB is that in general Apple's security is excellent. I'd love to see what a "Month of Windows Bugs" would unearth
Here you go: http://spacex.com/00Graphics/Videos/Falcon%201%20D emo2%20Launch%202007%20-%20High%20Quality.wmv
WMV format only, sorry. Amazing stuff, really exciting.
I know a few entrepreneurial internet startup types. These are the guys who are creating the new economy, right now. Building innovative new services, mostly using the web. This area is the future, everyone knows it, and I fully expect some of my friends to be multi-multi-millionaires in the years to come.
.. and that's why I don't worry about Microsoft anymore.
Now if I were to suggest to these people - any of them, in fact - that they deploy on Windows, they would roll around on the floor laughing for a few minutes, before permanently writing me off as a complete idiot.
This is Microsoft's problem. They can fool the old guard for a while longer perhaps; no-one wants to do any large scale Exchange migrations anytime soon - not anyone who's ever tried before, anyway. But the new guard, all the innovation online, doesn't belong to them and moves further away every day. All the exciting new developments on the web are OSS and without even a single exception no-one I know would consider using anything else. Even those who still program on Windows wouldn't use it server-side.
So this marketing effort might pay off a few percentage points here and there as MS squeezes Joe Company's backroom for a few more Server 2003 licenses but the really big ship has already sailed, a long time ago. Can you name even a single new online service you're excited about that uses Windows? Even one? Thought not.
So hell, let them squeeze the old guard for all they're worth. The new platform, the web and the internet itself, has slipped through MS's fingers
.. because it throws down the gauntlet to China. China's in the same position the USSR was a generation ago - proud, insecure, and eager - perhaps overeager - to demonstrate its "greatness". But unlike the USSR, they actually have the economic viability to mount a decent long-term challenge to the USA.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. America is a great country but it NEEDS a competitor. Without Russia to "compete against" the whole game has fallen apart, the US has lost its confidence, progress in "national pride" projects such as this grinds to a helpless standstill while the narrow-minded lefties whine about "the money could be best spent at home" and similar short-term thinking - and let's not even mention the miserable standstill in the middle east.
China is shaping up to be the new Russia for America - a capable, proud opponent who will catalyse any number of "races", some good, some bad. But any way you cut it, this can only be a good thing in the long term, and China certainly presents less of a threat than Russia.
Now if the Euros could get in on the action, we could have a three-way race to the stars, and progress in space technology will accelerate to a pace we can only dream of today, and about time.
Brilliant news, let's wait for China's response - that's what will really "lock it in".
I used to be a big Sony fan. My friends would make jokes about how much of a Sony fan I was - Sony TV, Sony monitor, Sony CD players and headphones. The whole deal. Not fanboy mind you, just a genuine fan of a great company.
.. buying that record company is high on the list of possibilities. Taking a king hit from Apple and/or Samsung that they never really recovered from, maybe. Or perhaps just inevitable corporate cultural decline. It's an interesting, but depressing, story.
About 5 years ago my opinion of them slowly began to sour, like a lot of peoples' it seems. And now, looking around me, I don't have any Sony stuff at all - I gave it all away during my natural cycle of replacements. My new generation of stereo equipment, for example, is heavily informed by the existence of iTunes & iPod, and where I once would have had nothing but Trinitron there's now Samsung and Apple.
So I've got pretty strong feelings about Sony. I used to love them, before they started going wrong. They used to be the best in so many categories, now I couldn't name any area in which I think they are. It's a kind of bitter feeling for me at least, watching a company you used to love go bad. I've often wondered about what really caused it
But no matter how bitter I feel about them, I'll never dig this kind of overenthusiastic schadenfreude that I see here, gleefully revelling in every little misstep, like a bunch of stupid little brats in some playground. Sony used to be great. What's happened to them should be a sobering study in corporate cancer, not an opportunity for some cheap yuks at any possible bad news.
I think there's a lot of entrepreneurial wannabes here, maybe like me. Sony used to be the kind of company I aspired to. Maybe not realistically expecting to mirror their successes but, you know, "if I could have any company, it would be Sony" kind of deal. But now, seeing what's happening to them, I wonder if any company can keep its integrity or whether companies that get too big just inevitably rot from the inside, as seems to be happening here. I'd love to have intelligent discussions about what the hell went wrong at Sony, how and if other companies can avoid this kind of cancer, try to find the inflection points where decisions were made that were critically wrong in hindsight.
But fuck this childish mocking! Are there really people here who take actual pleasure in seeing once-great companies falter? If so, that's just pathetic.
I'd tell you, but slashdot can't display japanese characters. Great work guys! Real up-to-date!
Let me ask you a question my friend. Are you against the war on drugs?
Yes, of course you are. The war on drugs is stupid. Why bother targeting the suppliers, when everyone knows that people want drugs and they're going to get them one way or the other. It's obvious! Anyone with half a brain is against the war on drugs.
So why are you blaming the choices of the American people on Bush, Cheney, etc? Don't get me wrong, I can't stand Bush. But I'm sick of people blaming America's ills solely on him, just like they blame the drug problem on the dealers. I don't like dealers, I don't like Bush. But the people always get what they want.
America's problem is simple. The people are too rich, fat and lazy, and forgot the important principles of their country's founding. It is as simple as that. There is only one way the current trend will be reversed, and that's when all the soccer moms care deeply about their, and their country's, liberty. Do you think that's happening anytime soon?
You can blame Dubya all you want, but that's the easy way out. Make him a scapegoat all you want, but next election the people will just vote for someone even worse. If you want to solve the problem, you have to reach the people, and that's a much harder job than simply dissing Dubya. Personally I can't tell the difference between the GOP and the Dems anyway, besides a couple of minor talking points .. I don't see the Democrats pledging to disband the DHS and trash the no fly lists, do you?
I'm not American, but I also love your country (I'm Australian), and I am so sad to see this decline. And the worse thing is, where America leads, we will follow, as in everything else...
A little birdie told me a totally free competing system will be available later this year.