Its not news, as indicated by the journalistic codeword "may" as in "there MAY not actually be a story here but its good for click-throughs, so we're going to run it anyways".
Its very similar to Bettridge's Law of headlines: If a headline uses the word "may", you can generally assume that there will be little actual substance and a lot of overstatement in the article.
I don't know why people believe otherwise. Your own skin is evidence of such resistance.
Because becoming immune to an oxidizing agent is a heck of a lot different than becoming immune to something targetting specific proteins / receptors / metabolic paths.
Ie, becoming immune to bleach would be sort of like if a bacteria became immune to breaching the cell wall with a needle.
The starvation rate in america is so low that it is not tracked independently of "exposure deaths". Heck, go to "feedingamerica.com" and try to actually find starvation stats: i couldnt even find the word "starve" on their stats page.
bullets are not stopped (and bounced back) by reflective sheeting.
Nor is any laser of any reasonable power. Not sure the exact formula / power, but a quick google search indicates that hobbyists cut things like reflective mylar foil with 3-watt CO2 lasers, which Im sure can be powered by a 500HP generator.
Generally an object in the battlefield will not be dust-free, and anything at all that isnt reflecting light is absorbing energy. Very quickly even a highly reflective surface burns and stops being reflective.
3) reflective surfaces become markedly less so when flying in the real world, what with dust and such 4) no surface is 100% reflective, and will rapidly char as it absorbs heat, bringing its reflectivity down.
TIL: OpenBSD is responsible for booting from encrypted volumes (incredible, since Windows and Linux have been capable of this for about a decade, and OpenBSD only started supporting it in 5.3!), MBR protection (aka secureboot), and ASLR (added to: OpenBSD-2008, Windows -2007, Linux - 2005).
I also learned that Truecrypt, BestCrypt, Bitlocker, and LUKS have all been doing it wrong for well over a decade.
You assume that the people running the NSA care about anything but their own power. This seems silly.
One can overreach and grasp power, but still take ones job seriously. My experience has taught me that you cant be good at security without being passionate about it; Im sure that whatever their faults and regardless of the legality or morality of the NSA shenanigans, they certainly do want to keep the "bad guys".
Some bulky "management interface" to hold your hand while you take 10 times as long as necessary to do the simple task of *removing an entry from a text file*? What is wrong with you?
That sounds great and wonderful until you try to configure something like SS5 and realize just how arcane and difficult doing config by hand can be at times.
Not that I generally disagree with the premise, I just think your lenses are perhaps a bit too rose-tinted; there are a lot of programs where getting the text config just right is a nightmare.
If you buy 50 BTC now, and then 100 BTC in 6 months, a year from now you would be able to sell 50 BTC. It doesnt terribly matter "which" bitcoins youve sold, because the income will be the same, the amount you paid will be the same, and the quantity will be the same.
I think you will find that, legally speaking, we DO have the right.
Having the ability and means to protect your household from others is a pretty fundamental thing, and its scary that so many people are prepared to trivialize it. As has been pointed out so many times, the premise that you can just cede all of your rights to the government and trust them to do the right thing has turned out to be wrong a million times over.
What, do you suppose the second amendment was written to allow people to hunt as a hobby?
I dont think you understand how cookies work: they arent "planted", the website requests that your browser create the cookie. You went to a URL and said "please send me all of your content", which your browser then rendered "without your consent", grabbed and executed scripts "without your consent", and stored cookies "without your consent". But of course your consent was implicit in choosing to visit that URL and request resources from that server; its your fault if you walk into a store and then complain that you're now on their CCTV because you chose to visit that store and play by their rules.
A lot of browsers (including IE starting with v6) allow you to disable cookies, or prompt you when they are requested. If this actually mattered to you, you could easily be notified when google cookies are "aimed" at your computer, and deny them, and then refuse to visit those sites.
And regarding the "multiple countries fined google", the US did not. Europe has some fairly strict laws on privacy, but anyone with any sort of technical understanding of WiFi understands that unencrypted publicly broadcasted wifi signals are not "private". You may be correct regarding storing the payloads, but as I recall the entire point of their exercise was to gather SSIDs for location info-- not to do any analysis on the payloads. Considering that theres not really any practical way to gather one without gathering the other (you run airodump), its a bit silly to make a huge thing about this. Your computer is already receiving the traffic, all google did was record it.
Find me a conviction for it in the US, otherwise really not interested in what a german court had to say about google.
A lot of the reason EVERYONE tempers their speech in public is because of the social consequences. That is not censorship, and yes there is a huge difference.
The difference is, if there were some highly valuable principle that could be served by using taboo speech, the fact that its not illegal means that your freedom and property cannot be taken from you for pursuing it.
They also get praise for when the fight the good fight,
Not really, no, they dont. There has been some sort of bizarre campaign against google for like the past 6-7 years, with some advising to use Bing or Yahoo if you care about privacy-- which shows you just how wacky things are.
I mean, lets look at this case: From what I can determine (not having an android), they built some code to control privacy features, but didnt finish it or release it, and there was a very real chance that it would cause problems. So they removed this hidden, essentially beta-quality code; and if some of the comments are to be believed they rolled it into a later version of the OS. And people are complaining that the whole exercise was somehow to steal privacy from the user, as if that somehow makes sense.
It would be a good thing if there werent ridiculous double standards whenever people compare google and their competitors.
They voluntarily shared user data in China and Russia.
Wrong, try again. They were threatening to leave China for a while about 7 years ago because China was pressing hard for them to spill the beans on what kinds of searches folks were doing, and Google didnt want to play that game. Of course as I linked Yahoo and MS were all too happy to comply, Im not really clear how that makes them better in your book.
More recently (less than a year ago?) Google started alerting users when Chinas GFW was tampering with their connections in response to "forbidden" queries, which led to a sort of arms race between the two of them.
They cooperate with the NSA ALL of the time
Source? Because the Snowden leaks indicate that the snooping was done without Google's knowledge, and was done to basically all major internet companies.
They data mine their clients (you and I) and they have removed most means to restrict access to personal info.
Bull. 1) Android lets you use third party marketplaces to install whatever you want; as does Chrome; as does Google apps. The first two let you set up whatever privacy features you want. 2) Chrome since beta has allowed you to turn off all tracking 3) they track basically the same info as every major search provider in the last 10 years. Theyre probably better at it, but hey: they do let you opt out, and they DO fight requests from the authorities to hand that info over.
Do you work for Google?
No, Im an IT consultant / contractor. I dont really have a particular vested interest in Google, except that they seem to actually care about building good products and employing actual functional security. I do have a number of acquaintances in China who are directly affected by the shenanigans of the other companies I mentioned, so perhaps Im biased in that manner.
You have a lot of questions, I have one for you: who are you supposing is among the best, if Google is among the worst?
They didnt share info with the NSA. The whole point was that the NSA was grabbing data off of the wire without permission or knowledge. Google actually has a pretty solid track record of not rolling over every time the authorities come knocking without a warrant.
Of course, you seem to think that the info streetview gathers is somehow private (its not, we're talking about public wifi beacons broadcast to the whole neighborhood), and wherever you got your information has misled you: far from lying about it, Google is the one who actually dropped the news that they were accidentally collecting info.
When did I accept Google to track
When you visited their sites and began using their services. For non-google sites, when you visited sites whose webmasters made the decision to use google analytics or adwords.
Dont like it, take it up with those sites: Theyre the ones making the decision to drop google cookies on your machine.
You do realize that the groups classified as "right" and "left" have fairly widely diverging opinions on exactly how the government should be run, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Its not news, as indicated by the journalistic codeword "may" as in "there MAY not actually be a story here but its good for click-throughs, so we're going to run it anyways".
Its very similar to Bettridge's Law of headlines: If a headline uses the word "may", you can generally assume that there will be little actual substance and a lot of overstatement in the article.
One declared by congress.
Why do you assume that the NSA is good at security?
Because theyre pretty widely recognized as having some of the best cryptoanalysts out there, for one.
Snowden was a contractor, who had access to a significant amount of data he didn't need to know for his job.
As I recall he was cleared for that access.
Clearly they're not good at security
Clearly thats not true, considering the contributions theyve made to cryptography, secure linux, etc.
I don't know why people believe otherwise. Your own skin is evidence of such resistance.
Because becoming immune to an oxidizing agent is a heck of a lot different than becoming immune to something targetting specific proteins / receptors / metabolic paths.
Ie, becoming immune to bleach would be sort of like if a bacteria became immune to breaching the cell wall with a needle.
IIRC, declaring martial law does require a war or insurrection.
The starvation rate in america is so low that it is not tracked independently of "exposure deaths". Heck, go to "feedingamerica.com" and try to actually find starvation stats: i couldnt even find the word "starve" on their stats page.
bullets are not stopped (and bounced back) by reflective sheeting.
Nor is any laser of any reasonable power. Not sure the exact formula / power, but a quick google search indicates that hobbyists cut things like reflective mylar foil with 3-watt CO2 lasers, which Im sure can be powered by a 500HP generator.
Generally an object in the battlefield will not be dust-free, and anything at all that isnt reflecting light is absorbing energy. Very quickly even a highly reflective surface burns and stops being reflective.
Plus you only need to apply enough energy to kill the reflectivity: a charred mirror isnt terribly reflective anymore.
3) reflective surfaces become markedly less so when flying in the real world, what with dust and such
4) no surface is 100% reflective, and will rapidly char as it absorbs heat, bringing its reflectivity down.
Elon Musk
TIL: OpenBSD is responsible for booting from encrypted volumes (incredible, since Windows and Linux have been capable of this for about a decade, and OpenBSD only started supporting it in 5.3!), MBR protection (aka secureboot), and ASLR (added to: OpenBSD-2008, Windows -2007, Linux - 2005).
I also learned that Truecrypt, BestCrypt, Bitlocker, and LUKS have all been doing it wrong for well over a decade.
Incredible!
You assume that the people running the NSA care about anything but their own power. This seems silly.
One can overreach and grasp power, but still take ones job seriously. My experience has taught me that you cant be good at security without being passionate about it; Im sure that whatever their faults and regardless of the legality or morality of the NSA shenanigans, they certainly do want to keep the "bad guys".
Some bulky "management interface" to hold your hand while you take 10 times as long as necessary to do the simple task of *removing an entry from a text file*? What is wrong with you?
That sounds great and wonderful until you try to configure something like SS5 and realize just how arcane and difficult doing config by hand can be at times.
Not that I generally disagree with the premise, I just think your lenses are perhaps a bit too rose-tinted; there are a lot of programs where getting the text config just right is a nightmare.
If you buy 50 BTC now, and then 100 BTC in 6 months, a year from now you would be able to sell 50 BTC. It doesnt terribly matter "which" bitcoins youve sold, because the income will be the same, the amount you paid will be the same, and the quantity will be the same.
I think thats what people are referring to.
Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right
I think you will find that, legally speaking, we DO have the right.
Having the ability and means to protect your household from others is a pretty fundamental thing, and its scary that so many people are prepared to trivialize it. As has been pointed out so many times, the premise that you can just cede all of your rights to the government and trust them to do the right thing has turned out to be wrong a million times over.
What, do you suppose the second amendment was written to allow people to hunt as a hobby?
De-duping of images that have unique names keyed to your email address? Really?
Its called block-level deduplication, and its not terribly exotic as storage technologies go.
I dont think you understand how cookies work: they arent "planted", the website requests that your browser create the cookie. You went to a URL and said "please send me all of your content", which your browser then rendered "without your consent", grabbed and executed scripts "without your consent", and stored cookies "without your consent". But of course your consent was implicit in choosing to visit that URL and request resources from that server; its your fault if you walk into a store and then complain that you're now on their CCTV because you chose to visit that store and play by their rules.
A lot of browsers (including IE starting with v6) allow you to disable cookies, or prompt you when they are requested. If this actually mattered to you, you could easily be notified when google cookies are "aimed" at your computer, and deny them, and then refuse to visit those sites.
And regarding the "multiple countries fined google", the US did not. Europe has some fairly strict laws on privacy, but anyone with any sort of technical understanding of WiFi understands that unencrypted publicly broadcasted wifi signals are not "private". You may be correct regarding storing the payloads, but as I recall the entire point of their exercise was to gather SSIDs for location info-- not to do any analysis on the payloads. Considering that theres not really any practical way to gather one without gathering the other (you run airodump), its a bit silly to make a huge thing about this. Your computer is already receiving the traffic, all google did was record it.
Find me a conviction for it in the US, otherwise really not interested in what a german court had to say about google.
You also lose ALL of your freedoms.
A lot of the reason EVERYONE tempers their speech in public is because of the social consequences. That is not censorship, and yes there is a huge difference.
The difference is, if there were some highly valuable principle that could be served by using taboo speech, the fact that its not illegal means that your freedom and property cannot be taken from you for pursuing it.
They also get praise for when the fight the good fight,
Not really, no, they dont. There has been some sort of bizarre campaign against google for like the past 6-7 years, with some advising to use Bing or Yahoo if you care about privacy-- which shows you just how wacky things are.
I mean, lets look at this case: From what I can determine (not having an android), they built some code to control privacy features, but didnt finish it or release it, and there was a very real chance that it would cause problems. So they removed this hidden, essentially beta-quality code; and if some of the comments are to be believed they rolled it into a later version of the OS. And people are complaining that the whole exercise was somehow to steal privacy from the user, as if that somehow makes sense.
It would be a good thing if there werent ridiculous double standards whenever people compare google and their competitors.
They voluntarily shared user data in China and Russia.
Wrong, try again. They were threatening to leave China for a while about 7 years ago because China was pressing hard for them to spill the beans on what kinds of searches folks were doing, and Google didnt want to play that game. Of course as I linked Yahoo and MS were all too happy to comply, Im not really clear how that makes them better in your book.
More recently (less than a year ago?) Google started alerting users when Chinas GFW was tampering with their connections in response to "forbidden" queries, which led to a sort of arms race between the two of them.
They cooperate with the NSA ALL of the time
Source? Because the Snowden leaks indicate that the snooping was done without Google's knowledge, and was done to basically all major internet companies.
They data mine their clients (you and I) and they have removed most means to restrict access to personal info.
Bull.
1) Android lets you use third party marketplaces to install whatever you want; as does Chrome; as does Google apps. The first two let you set up whatever privacy features you want.
2) Chrome since beta has allowed you to turn off all tracking
3) they track basically the same info as every major search provider in the last 10 years. Theyre probably better at it, but hey: they do let you opt out, and they DO fight requests from the authorities to hand that info over.
Do you work for Google?
No, Im an IT consultant / contractor. I dont really have a particular vested interest in Google, except that they seem to actually care about building good products and employing actual functional security. I do have a number of acquaintances in China who are directly affected by the shenanigans of the other companies I mentioned, so perhaps Im biased in that manner.
You have a lot of questions, I have one for you: who are you supposing is among the best, if Google is among the worst?
They didnt share info with the NSA. The whole point was that the NSA was grabbing data off of the wire without permission or knowledge. Google actually has a pretty solid track record of not rolling over every time the authorities come knocking without a warrant.
Of course, you seem to think that the info streetview gathers is somehow private (its not, we're talking about public wifi beacons broadcast to the whole neighborhood), and wherever you got your information has misled you: far from lying about it, Google is the one who actually dropped the news that they were accidentally collecting info.
When did I accept Google to track
When you visited their sites and began using their services. For non-google sites, when you visited sites whose webmasters made the decision to use google analytics or adwords.
Dont like it, take it up with those sites: Theyre the ones making the decision to drop google cookies on your machine.
Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that ATI drivers for linux have ALWAYS been terrible.
Pretty sure Valve has their own priorities, and (gasp) they probably arent the same as yours or Linus'.
The good news is that their effort doesnt stop anyone elses efforts to the contrary.
You do realize that the groups classified as "right" and "left" have fairly widely diverging opinions on exactly how the government should be run, right?