While I mostly agree with what you say, it's not that easy.
As you pointed out the idea of multi-touching and gestures is not new, it may even be called age-old. Think of a womans body... reacts very well under multiple touches. It's just a way of interacting. The implementation of that however is another matter. How to detect those touches that's where the patents come in. But patents is not an easy matter.
For a start obviousness: many inventions that are patentable look obvious. This are very simple solutions to problems. But often they are only obvious after someone points it out to you. Novelty is a bit less ambiguous, as there is something like "prior art".
The worst patent fights we see is typically in software; the second bad one is medicine. For the rest the patent system works pretty much as designed, that is for the traditional technical/physical/machine type inventions.
Also in case of these "multi-touch" patents, it is most certainly not on the user-side of multi-touch. It must be on specific implementations of multi-touch, either technical (how to detect those two or more touches on a surface) or software (what to do with it). The first one I think could certainly be patent-worthy, the second not.
There may be multiple ways to implement those touch surfaces: different detection tricks and so. Those may each be patentable, and no problem with that. Use method A, pay for patent A, and you're OK. Invent your own method B, you may patent it yourself, and you can implement multi-touch by yourself using your method. Patents work as they should.
The problem is software-patents where a certain trick which may be implemented in numerous different, innovative ways gets patented. Then your new way to get the same result suddenly falls under an existing patent. And there it goes wrong.
Maybe that doctor should have suggested you to go and catch a little more sunlight. Something like 30 mins a day of exposing face and arms should do the job. And sunlight tends to make people feel happy as a free bonus.
The worst part of this feature is that it doesn't allow me to copy/past said message into a browser to google it and possibly get more information on what it actually means.
I would consider it reasonable if cases like Sony's root kit fiasco would be punishable under computer crime laws, like gaining unauthorised access to a computer.
In that case: when someone wants to play a music CD on a computer he does not expect it to start running any kind of software on that computer. If it does through the auto-start function, then it should immediately show itself to the user, and tell exactly what it intends to install, and not install anything without any kind of further user interaction. Anything less (silently starting, installing components unannounced, etc) I would consider "unauthorised access".
The failing DRM would IMHO fall under the "broken, please refund" category, as the software/game absolutely doesn't work as advertised in that case. And if shop refuses the return due top open packing, maybe small claims courts are a suitable avenue.
A typical OSS license only involves copyright, and related issues such as redistribution and making changes.
However many OSS software is "sold" with all kinds of claims on what it can do. Have a look at the Firefox home page for example:
Meet the World’s Best Browser
With security, stability, speed and much more, Firefox is made for the way you use the Web.
That's what it starts with. I would consider this plain advertising, and as such fall under relevant advertising laws for a start.
Now indeed when I download this software I do not sign a sales contract with the Mozilla Foundation, however I do have certain expectations regarding fitness for purpose and so. Bugs I expect that there are in it, I also expect that the writer will for starters do their best to write bug-free software, and when bugs are found that they will take reasonable action to solve them. And the bigger the project the higher those expectations.
An interesting case would become if someone loses say bank details due to a security leak in Mozilla or the underlying OS (thinking of Microsoft's Windows mainly of course). Especially if that bug is known and not acted upon.
Can anyone hold the e.g. Mozilla Foundation liable for such issues? Even when no money changed hands? They do have quite bold claims on their home page, obviously encouraging you to use their product.
I always learned that to un-park your car you basically just go the same way you got in... some pushing to the side may be necessary in this case but should be doable.
Cool video, cool stuff. But there is good reason these stunts are done on closed tracks only.
Anyway to come back on learning capacity: we have been building computers for just over half a century now, and they are getting quite powerful. And indeed some AI is appearing.
OTOH the human brain has been in development for millions of years. Admittedly trial and error is less efficient than the direct approach like we have with computers, still I would say the learning capacity of our brains is far more mature than anywhere our computers will get in the near future.
And for sliding predictably: for our brains it's predictable, after a lot of tries. However as the Stanford people point out it is as yet not possible to accurately predict this using mathematical models, particularly the sliding part they couldn't manage. Thus they had to use self-learning systems, that practiced, and learned how a car reacts to certain control movements, and repeat what works. Just like we do with our brains.
It will have taken them many tries to get this right. But it would be interesting to compare this to how many tries you and me would need to be able to pull off this stunt. Personally I have never even tried but I have done a slip-course: sliding around a specially prepared track as training of what to do in case you get in a slip during normal driving, mainly how to get out of the slip.
IIRC in The Netherlands the rule is that if you find say a wallet (or something that is obviously lost and not abandoned) you are to hand it in to the police, or just give it back to the owner if you happen to know them. If no-one claims the lost object after something like three years it's indeed for the finder - people who have lost something valuable of course are expected to report this to police. Not handing such object to the police is theft. I think in most countries it works roughly like that, to me it's sensible.
The same goes for any anonymous videos of police beating a suspect, etc. Unless there is a way to disable this, it does a lot to remove your privacy.
As I understand already it is possible to add such information to videos - this only allows for more information. Just like EXIF info from digital cameras, that can also contain lots of information about the photo and the maker. I don't know exactly what may stored but I expect this includes some camera serial number or so linking it to a unique piece of equipment, which may or may not be liked to a person (e.g. through warranty registration).
So for self-generated content it doesn't seem to be much of a difference compared to the current situation. Also as for being self-generated it should be trivial to either disable this extension (after all it's just an extension to existing MPEG video formats), or to manipulate it in such a way that it is not traceable to the maker. And my worries for privacy issues lie only with downloaded/purchased content.
I was more thinking in the line of privacy: if every frame can have a signature added, then every single copy can be "watermarked" and tracked to an individual.
Otoh, they talk about adding subtitles etc to "completely change the signature of the video". How is that different from the current situation? Thinking of "signature" as MD5 hash or something equivalent. Any change to the file will change it's hash. This part is nothing new.
And the malware will find different ways to get around that again of course.
Isn't this simply a case of when a system is compromised, it can not reliably detect this by itself? Viruses that switch off AV, that hide from AV, that pretend to be not there - of course this can happen when a system is compromised already, and when the process you are trying to detect knows it may be detected and can defend itself against this.
The only way to reliably detect whether a system is compromised is to take the hard disk, put it in a known-good system, mount it read-only, and scan for anomalies. That's at least what I have been told over the last decade or more. And the above "critical flaw" is yet another point in case.
And for that, the fastest connection is a mere 5 Mb/s...
Says me who for living just outside the main city area can only get ADSL of up to 10, 12 Mbit/s or so, while many high-rises have 30 Mb/s (fibre) at about the same price, and up to 1000 Mbit options. That's faster than my LAN, but really expensive of course.
I have 8 Mb/s and routinely get >800 KB/s downloads, torrents or otherwise. So that 8 Mb is the true speed. For under USD 30 per month. And no GB limits. Including some free pay-TV channels to hook you on their digital pay-TV.
Maybe Dell Canada should start investing in proper networks if only in the urban areas, instead of adding this kind of charges.
Actually, the way that most Chinese people type on the computer is using a Latin keyboard to type pinyin phonetics.
Not true - there are many more and much better ways to input Chinese. Most commonly used for traditional is Changjie, where every letter has a part of a character (many parts come back in characters). My keyboard has them all printed on the keys together with the normal letters. So basically they enter the characters directly, piece by piece, in a way similar to how we compose a word. The order matters as well of course.
An English speaker would have to be retarded to not be able to make basic sense of a Swedish or French web site. Hungarian, okay, that's harder.
Very very hard to do: the phonetics are different, grammar is different, you may be able to figure out the topic but that's about it really. Making basic sense of it, don't think so. I have learnt French in secondary school and can barely manage.
Since sometime back in the '90s the web site www.ilse.nl was founded: a search engine that would index Dutch language sites only. Very useful for those that speak Dutch. Luckily for us Dutch we don't need a different character set, we can get along with the limits of Latin just fine. When it came to searching for Dutch language sites it was the number one choice. And so there are a few more, www.startpagina.nl is another very popular one.
Wikipedia comes in lots of languages - but I have never heard anyone here shout "fragmentation! Less freedom!" about that. Even though most of those other languages are inaccessible to them. But then English is inaccessible for a large part of the world, and the vast majority of people still prefers to use their native language. And that preference continues online. Even though they may be proficient in English.
I can actually imagine that the English language in the long term becomes a minority language. After all there are more native Chinese speakers than native English speakers in this world. There are probably even more non-English speakers than that there are English speakers, and in this case not even talking about native English speakers.
Fails to render the name correctly for me in FF but I'm not surprised. Now only if they would translate the/ar/default.aspx as well... the English legacy is still clearly visible.
It would be strange for (in that case) some Arabic TLD to 1) render correctly in a browser of a non-Arabic speaker, and 2) to have Latin characters in the domain name itself and 3) still manage to look correct in RTL scripts.
This way lots of non-English speakers, or even users of non-Latin alphabets, can use the Internet much better than they could before. Only half of the world uses Latin. So the other half is more or less excluded because domain names have those limitations, so just to be able to use the Internet they first have to learn a foreign script (a phonetic script - Chinese for example is not phonetic, so that in itself is a huge challenge for a Chinese to learn).
But you probably never set foot outside of your own country, let alone into a place where people actually use such a non-Latin script. If you did so you may start to understand why this is a Very Good Thing.
And the Internet is not going to be more "fragmented". When is the last time you visited say a Swedish or French or Hungarian web site? It is not that they use a different script or so. However I have the feeling that you still can not read what is written there - so that is "fragmented" already for you. And as long as you do not learn how read Arabic or Japanese or Chinese you will not likely want to visit any of those web sites that use Arabic, Japanese or Chinese native characters for name.
Which would put the age of that dam to at least 40 years.
Somehow that sounds highly plausible to me. Old parts of thoroughly built dam, that get naturally reinforced by sand/mud deposits and overgrowth, not needing much maintenance but still providing a habitat for the beavers. And of course the best place to start building a dam home is where there is something like a dam already.
Fair enough, but really, I still think that an individual has much less chance of standing up to a government than a corporation does.
Luckily I do not have the feeling that I will have to "stand up" against my government. If the government comes with a proper court-issued subpoena, then I will have to cooperate. So do I expect other companies to do. The issue I have with the US government is that they have so many ways of NOT following those proper procedures. Which makes the US specifically a jurisdiction where I would not want to store my data. They do not protect their own citizen's privacy, let alone that of foreigners like me.
My complaint is also not against Google as such, I also think they do what they can (their China pull-out for example showed that they still do care about human rights and privacy issues). It is against storing data at a third party (I would AT LEAST want to keep back-ups under my direct control), and in a foreign country. And still Google would be my first choice at the moment if I would really need such cloud options.
Apple may currently still dominate on-line music sales, it is not for technical reasons any more. Most if not all major labels nowadays, and independents for longer, sell their music DRM free. The DRM was the only thing locking stores to devices. That's gone.
That they still dominate is that they apparently have a music store that people like better than the other stores.
And in the case of video, Apple is pushing a DRM free format, so anyone can publish video that plays on Apple's devices.
If Gmail were to suddenly crash and burn, most of the people using it would lose all their mails.
First of all, I'm pretty sure Gmail has much more robust datacenters, with multiple levels of redundancy and backups, than 99.9% of all companies out there.
I was more thinking in the lines of going out of business for whatever reason (takeover, bankrupty - now don't tell me "they are too big/rich", think Enron for example) and Gmail is closed.
The only difference is that it's your personal responsibility for ensuring that the server is secure instead of Google's. Now, I'm not doubting your technical prowess, but even giving you the benefit of a doubt that you are personally smarter than the hundreds of PhDs working at Google that do nothing but this for a living, the vast majority of people and companies aren't.
The number of attacks on Google's servers is also certainly way higher.
Because if you don't, then even if you run your own mail server, you are still at pretty high risk of your e-mail being intercepted and read.
Yes, but no historical mails an be gotten that way.
And even if you do, then I have to point out that even if you run your own mail server, you are storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy.
No I don't. My location's (Hong Kong - no that is not China) government has far better respect for privacy than the US government. And as I said before I like to keep my data in my own hands as much as possible.
As long as we're thinking up unlikely scenarios such as Google giving access to your e-mail to the government without any kind of due process or your knowledge and consent,
Is that so unlikely, really? Thinking of that huge wiretapping scandal in the US from the last years? It was supposed to remain secret... and has operated for years in total secrecy. To this day there are a lot of unknowns about this whole project: most we know about it is that it happened.
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While I mostly agree with what you say, it's not that easy.
As you pointed out the idea of multi-touching and gestures is not new, it may even be called age-old. Think of a womans body... reacts very well under multiple touches. It's just a way of interacting. The implementation of that however is another matter. How to detect those touches that's where the patents come in. But patents is not an easy matter.
For a start obviousness: many inventions that are patentable look obvious. This are very simple solutions to problems. But often they are only obvious after someone points it out to you. Novelty is a bit less ambiguous, as there is something like "prior art".
The worst patent fights we see is typically in software; the second bad one is medicine. For the rest the patent system works pretty much as designed, that is for the traditional technical/physical/machine type inventions.
Also in case of these "multi-touch" patents, it is most certainly not on the user-side of multi-touch. It must be on specific implementations of multi-touch, either technical (how to detect those two or more touches on a surface) or software (what to do with it). The first one I think could certainly be patent-worthy, the second not.
There may be multiple ways to implement those touch surfaces: different detection tricks and so. Those may each be patentable, and no problem with that. Use method A, pay for patent A, and you're OK. Invent your own method B, you may patent it yourself, and you can implement multi-touch by yourself using your method. Patents work as they should.
The problem is software-patents where a certain trick which may be implemented in numerous different, innovative ways gets patented. Then your new way to get the same result suddenly falls under an existing patent. And there it goes wrong.
Maybe that doctor should have suggested you to go and catch a little more sunlight. Something like 30 mins a day of exposing face and arms should do the job. And sunlight tends to make people feel happy as a free bonus.
The worst part of this feature is that it doesn't allow me to copy/past said message into a browser to google it and possibly get more information on what it actually means.
I would consider it reasonable if cases like Sony's root kit fiasco would be punishable under computer crime laws, like gaining unauthorised access to a computer.
In that case: when someone wants to play a music CD on a computer he does not expect it to start running any kind of software on that computer. If it does through the auto-start function, then it should immediately show itself to the user, and tell exactly what it intends to install, and not install anything without any kind of further user interaction. Anything less (silently starting, installing components unannounced, etc) I would consider "unauthorised access".
The failing DRM would IMHO fall under the "broken, please refund" category, as the software/game absolutely doesn't work as advertised in that case. And if shop refuses the return due top open packing, maybe small claims courts are a suitable avenue.
A typical OSS license only involves copyright, and related issues such as redistribution and making changes.
However many OSS software is "sold" with all kinds of claims on what it can do. Have a look at the Firefox home page for example:
Meet the World’s Best Browser With security, stability, speed and much more, Firefox is made for the way you use the Web.
That's what it starts with. I would consider this plain advertising, and as such fall under relevant advertising laws for a start.
Now indeed when I download this software I do not sign a sales contract with the Mozilla Foundation, however I do have certain expectations regarding fitness for purpose and so. Bugs I expect that there are in it, I also expect that the writer will for starters do their best to write bug-free software, and when bugs are found that they will take reasonable action to solve them. And the bigger the project the higher those expectations.
An interesting case would become if someone loses say bank details due to a security leak in Mozilla or the underlying OS (thinking of Microsoft's Windows mainly of course). Especially if that bug is known and not acted upon.
Can anyone hold the e.g. Mozilla Foundation liable for such issues? Even when no money changed hands? They do have quite bold claims on their home page, obviously encouraging you to use their product.
I always learned that to un-park your car you basically just go the same way you got in... some pushing to the side may be necessary in this case but should be doable.
Cool video, cool stuff. But there is good reason these stunts are done on closed tracks only.
Anyway to come back on learning capacity: we have been building computers for just over half a century now, and they are getting quite powerful. And indeed some AI is appearing.
OTOH the human brain has been in development for millions of years. Admittedly trial and error is less efficient than the direct approach like we have with computers, still I would say the learning capacity of our brains is far more mature than anywhere our computers will get in the near future.
And for sliding predictably: for our brains it's predictable, after a lot of tries. However as the Stanford people point out it is as yet not possible to accurately predict this using mathematical models, particularly the sliding part they couldn't manage. Thus they had to use self-learning systems, that practiced, and learned how a car reacts to certain control movements, and repeat what works. Just like we do with our brains.
It will have taken them many tries to get this right. But it would be interesting to compare this to how many tries you and me would need to be able to pull off this stunt. Personally I have never even tried but I have done a slip-course: sliding around a specially prepared track as training of what to do in case you get in a slip during normal driving, mainly how to get out of the slip.
IIRC in The Netherlands the rule is that if you find say a wallet (or something that is obviously lost and not abandoned) you are to hand it in to the police, or just give it back to the owner if you happen to know them. If no-one claims the lost object after something like three years it's indeed for the finder - people who have lost something valuable of course are expected to report this to police. Not handing such object to the police is theft. I think in most countries it works roughly like that, to me it's sensible.
The same goes for any anonymous videos of police beating a suspect, etc. Unless there is a way to disable this, it does a lot to remove your privacy.
As I understand already it is possible to add such information to videos - this only allows for more information. Just like EXIF info from digital cameras, that can also contain lots of information about the photo and the maker. I don't know exactly what may stored but I expect this includes some camera serial number or so linking it to a unique piece of equipment, which may or may not be liked to a person (e.g. through warranty registration).
So for self-generated content it doesn't seem to be much of a difference compared to the current situation. Also as for being self-generated it should be trivial to either disable this extension (after all it's just an extension to existing MPEG video formats), or to manipulate it in such a way that it is not traceable to the maker. And my worries for privacy issues lie only with downloaded/purchased content.
I was more thinking in the line of privacy: if every frame can have a signature added, then every single copy can be "watermarked" and tracked to an individual.
Otoh, they talk about adding subtitles etc to "completely change the signature of the video". How is that different from the current situation? Thinking of "signature" as MD5 hash or something equivalent. Any change to the file will change it's hash. This part is nothing new.
Don't you worry, I bet whoever will come to power in the UK will have no problem to out-do Labour.
And the malware will find different ways to get around that again of course.
Isn't this simply a case of when a system is compromised, it can not reliably detect this by itself? Viruses that switch off AV, that hide from AV, that pretend to be not there - of course this can happen when a system is compromised already, and when the process you are trying to detect knows it may be detected and can defend itself against this.
The only way to reliably detect whether a system is compromised is to take the hard disk, put it in a known-good system, mount it read-only, and scan for anomalies. That's at least what I have been told over the last decade or more. And the above "critical flaw" is yet another point in case.
And for that, the fastest connection is a mere 5 Mb/s...
Says me who for living just outside the main city area can only get ADSL of up to 10, 12 Mbit/s or so, while many high-rises have 30 Mb/s (fibre) at about the same price, and up to 1000 Mbit options. That's faster than my LAN, but really expensive of course.
I have 8 Mb/s and routinely get >800 KB/s downloads, torrents or otherwise. So that 8 Mb is the true speed. For under USD 30 per month. And no GB limits. Including some free pay-TV channels to hook you on their digital pay-TV.
Maybe Dell Canada should start investing in proper networks if only in the urban areas, instead of adding this kind of charges.
Actually, the way that most Chinese people type on the computer is using a Latin keyboard to type pinyin phonetics.
Not true - there are many more and much better ways to input Chinese. Most commonly used for traditional is Changjie, where every letter has a part of a character (many parts come back in characters). My keyboard has them all printed on the keys together with the normal letters. So basically they enter the characters directly, piece by piece, in a way similar to how we compose a word. The order matters as well of course.
An English speaker would have to be retarded to not be able to make basic sense of a Swedish or French web site. Hungarian, okay, that's harder.
Very very hard to do: the phonetics are different, grammar is different, you may be able to figure out the topic but that's about it really. Making basic sense of it, don't think so. I have learnt French in secondary school and can barely manage.
LOL and thanks about my English.
Yes languages are wonderful things and influence each other all the time.
But the word "kill" for creek, I don't think that has a Dutch origin. It just doesn't sound like it.
Not necessarily.
Since sometime back in the '90s the web site www.ilse.nl was founded: a search engine that would index Dutch language sites only. Very useful for those that speak Dutch. Luckily for us Dutch we don't need a different character set, we can get along with the limits of Latin just fine. When it came to searching for Dutch language sites it was the number one choice. And so there are a few more, www.startpagina.nl is another very popular one.
Wikipedia comes in lots of languages - but I have never heard anyone here shout "fragmentation! Less freedom!" about that. Even though most of those other languages are inaccessible to them. But then English is inaccessible for a large part of the world, and the vast majority of people still prefers to use their native language. And that preference continues online. Even though they may be proficient in English.
I can actually imagine that the English language in the long term becomes a minority language. After all there are more native Chinese speakers than native English speakers in this world. There are probably even more non-English speakers than that there are English speakers, and in this case not even talking about native English speakers.
How is it different with the current .com, .cn, .se, .fr, etc domains? It is just another country-specific TLD.
Fails to render the name correctly for me in FF but I'm not surprised. Now only if they would translate the /ar/default.aspx as well... the English legacy is still clearly visible.
It would be strange for (in that case) some Arabic TLD to 1) render correctly in a browser of a non-Arabic speaker, and 2) to have Latin characters in the domain name itself and 3) still manage to look correct in RTL scripts.
This way lots of non-English speakers, or even users of non-Latin alphabets, can use the Internet much better than they could before. Only half of the world uses Latin. So the other half is more or less excluded because domain names have those limitations, so just to be able to use the Internet they first have to learn a foreign script (a phonetic script - Chinese for example is not phonetic, so that in itself is a huge challenge for a Chinese to learn).
But you probably never set foot outside of your own country, let alone into a place where people actually use such a non-Latin script. If you did so you may start to understand why this is a Very Good Thing.
And the Internet is not going to be more "fragmented". When is the last time you visited say a Swedish or French or Hungarian web site? It is not that they use a different script or so. However I have the feeling that you still can not read what is written there - so that is "fragmented" already for you. And as long as you do not learn how read Arabic or Japanese or Chinese you will not likely want to visit any of those web sites that use Arabic, Japanese or Chinese native characters for name.
Which would put the age of that dam to at least 40 years.
Somehow that sounds highly plausible to me. Old parts of thoroughly built dam, that get naturally reinforced by sand/mud deposits and overgrowth, not needing much maintenance but still providing a habitat for the beavers. And of course the best place to start building a dam home is where there is something like a dam already.
Registering and getting good karma does the job as well. Kingdoms are in short supply these days.
Fair enough, but really, I still think that an individual has much less chance of standing up to a government than a corporation does.
Luckily I do not have the feeling that I will have to "stand up" against my government. If the government comes with a proper court-issued subpoena, then I will have to cooperate. So do I expect other companies to do. The issue I have with the US government is that they have so many ways of NOT following those proper procedures. Which makes the US specifically a jurisdiction where I would not want to store my data. They do not protect their own citizen's privacy, let alone that of foreigners like me.
My complaint is also not against Google as such, I also think they do what they can (their China pull-out for example showed that they still do care about human rights and privacy issues). It is against storing data at a third party (I would AT LEAST want to keep back-ups under my direct control), and in a foreign country. And still Google would be my first choice at the moment if I would really need such cloud options.
Apple may currently still dominate on-line music sales, it is not for technical reasons any more. Most if not all major labels nowadays, and independents for longer, sell their music DRM free. The DRM was the only thing locking stores to devices. That's gone.
That they still dominate is that they apparently have a music store that people like better than the other stores.
And in the case of video, Apple is pushing a DRM free format, so anyone can publish video that plays on Apple's devices.
First of all, I'm pretty sure Gmail has much more robust datacenters, with multiple levels of redundancy and backups, than 99.9% of all companies out there.
I was more thinking in the lines of going out of business for whatever reason (takeover, bankrupty - now don't tell me "they are too big/rich", think Enron for example) and Gmail is closed.
The only difference is that it's your personal responsibility for ensuring that the server is secure instead of Google's. Now, I'm not doubting your technical prowess, but even giving you the benefit of a doubt that you are personally smarter than the hundreds of PhDs working at Google that do nothing but this for a living, the vast majority of people and companies aren't.
The number of attacks on Google's servers is also certainly way higher.
Because if you don't, then even if you run your own mail server, you are still at pretty high risk of your e-mail being intercepted and read.
Yes, but no historical mails an be gotten that way.
And even if you do, then I have to point out that even if you run your own mail server, you are storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy.
No I don't. My location's (Hong Kong - no that is not China) government has far better respect for privacy than the US government. And as I said before I like to keep my data in my own hands as much as possible.
As long as we're thinking up unlikely scenarios such as Google giving access to your e-mail to the government without any kind of due process or your knowledge and consent,
Is that so unlikely, really? Thinking of that huge wiretapping scandal in the US from the last years? It was supposed to remain secret... and has operated for years in total secrecy. To this day there are a lot of unknowns about this whole project: most we know about it is that it happened.