don't toss stones, as EVERY first world nation is doing this. Where you live is no more 'innocent'..
That's complete bullshit: #1 you have no fucking clue what other intelligence agencies are doing or not, and #2 there are good reasons to believe that most other nations don't even remotely have the budget to pull this off, and #3 policies and intel priorities differ vastly from nation to nation.
I'm more worried that they're saying he was "brilliant."
Yeah, well, that's because they want to portrait him as a brilliant evil genuis who should be incarcerated for the rest of his life (as he's obviously so dangerous) rather than just a guy who downloaded stuff on his thumbdrive because their internal security was shit.
I don't see any sort of automated analysis whose results are presented only to the recipient of the e-mail as a breach of privacy of the sender, who sent the information to the recipient.
But the information is also shared with the NSA and law enforcement agencies. We know that already. It could (and likely will) be used for proactive punishment of thought crimes.
Moreover, what you call "content analysis" is also a technical term from the intersection of corpus linguistics and psychology. Just by analysing text you can obtain a complete and fairly accurate personality profile of a person. Try out for example LIWC and see for yourself.
It's not harmless technology by any measure, it's a pretty big deal.
You're missing the point, which is that Dropbox did bad by obfuscating the code, because they should have made it Open Source right from the start and focus on selling their server-side hosting services. Keeping client code proprietary when it involves security and encryption of possibly confidential data is virtually always bad practise (outside the realm of embedded military applications using tamper-proof chips, perhaps).
They do not need to do real-time processing of the data: that is only necessary for filtering.
They do real-time processing, though.
However, real-time processing does not need to introduce any more delays than mere capturing would do, namely almost zero in both cases if the traffic is unencrypted. To be fair, a MitM attack on a VPN probably would introduce a delay.
It's just amusing to me to see NSA as the scapegoat of the day
It is used by Windows 8 and TPM 2.0 will be mandatory for all Windows 8.1 certified machines starting from 2015. It's part of a long-term strategy to introduce BIOS/UEFI-level digital rights management into consumer operating systems. The central idea behind all this is to bind the customer to the OS maker forever, make it hard to switch to alternative operating systems, and control application dispatch via app centers and application whitelisting instead of malware blacklisting.
After the tremendous success of locked-down phone hardware, managers in large corporations have come to think of the idea of a general computation device as a real threat, especially in light of free software that is starting to become more of a nuisance to software makers. They want to sell you new shit every 3 years, whereas the times where you need new shit every 3 years are long gone since computers have become fast enough for all everyday computing tasks. Hence, they really need control of the platform as a whole, from hardware over software dispatch to the software itself, and they form business alliances to achieve this goal.
I don't understand why the news and journals report what the NSA announces. For a long time this agency didn't even exist officially. They are allowed and expected to lie about absolutely everything, there are not even reliable records on how many people they employ. Their official statements are and have always been deliberate bullshit and disinformation. It's pointless to take into account anything they say about themselves at all.
Doesn't matter at all. It's a US company and they have full access to your machine. Or is the endpoint software open source and has been compiled and security audited by yourself?
It's not totally useless. If the NSA officially provided encrypted cloud storage for free or cheap, this might be interesting to US American companies and people who want to protect their data against others and have nothing against being snooped on by their own government. Heck, some people would probably give up their freedom and democratic principles for a glass of free beer.
You'd be wrong if you believed that. There's no law that says they can't encrypt a users data.
Nice phrasing. But there is a law that says they have to decrypt it for the US government without anyone ever telling about it, which is exactly the reason why Lavabit and Silent Circle gave up their business.
It's just that the bar to make web apps is a billion times lower than it is to write native code.
What do you mean by that? It's a hundred times easier and less complicated to make an app in, say, Lazarus or Qt than to create a working web app of any kind.
Javascript in Google's V8 is never worse than 20 times slower than C and never uses more than 24 times as much memory.
That is really bad performance, though. Think about it: 20 times slower, 20 times higher memory usage... if you'd use this for anything serious, it would bring even the fastest home PC or laptop to its knees. The good news is that nobody really uses web apps for anything serious (except web mail), they are mainly used for wasting time and jerking around. In other words, web apps and native apps are two different classes altogether - different users, different purposes, different markets.
Is there any way to program these things with a conventional programming language and conventional APIs? If so, I'll buy one.
By "conventional" I mean an API with functions like "open a new view/window, add an edit field and a pushbutton, if the pushbutton is pressed, do this and that with the edit field, store a file on the phone, etc." without ever having to touch HTML, XML or any other horrible web crap. I don't want to have to design simple phone applications as if they were client/server apps.
Where? One DIN A4 page is 8.27 x 11.69 inch. I've heard about prototypes, but haven't seen a single e-ink reader of this size so far anywhere, neither in shops nor on the Net as a product that can actually be purchased. Readers of this size don't exist.
Regarding epub formats, as a researcher at university I'm reading "professionally" - I absolutely need the original pagination. PDF is a must. I'm not even sure whether ebook formats can be referenced/quoted at all and certainly have never seen references to them in a journal. PDFs yes, other formats, No.
Moreover, for some people even the largest e-ink readers have too small displays, so they aren't buying any e-books at all.
For example, I'm reading mostly technical texts with lots of formulas. Until there is a large enough e-ink reader that can gracefully display any PDF without zooming, I'll have to stick with traditional books. I already have thousands of them so a few more won't hurt (that's what I tell myself when I order them, until I have to move...)
In a nutshell, you cannot trust such companies unless they open source all their software and make the way they operate very transparent. Even then, you should better think twice to whom you give away your trade secrets.
Encryption is always good, especially triple symmetric encryption using TEMK with different algorithms and two passphrases. For example, you could write a program that fills a USB stick with encrypted random keys, one for you with your key and one for the recipient with his own key, and derives session keys from that using a user-defined offset (which could be a word, for instance). One direct key exchange from person to person can suffice for years of secure sessions as long as both parties manage to keep their USB sticks and matserpassphrases safe.
False flag keywords are a bad idea, though. They don't work and only help the NSA to compile lists of activists who are particularly critical of the government and its apparatus. (Not that they cannot compile such a list with a simple query already.)
Yeah, I'm using one in the sun almost daily and it sucks. Luckily, mine has a mate screen. Unfortunately, there seems to be only one company, California-based Clover Systems who sell laptops with Pixelq screen (except for OLPC who are unusable for serious work). There modded netbooks are a bit pricey, though. Still I'm tempted to order one some day.
So yes, without a display that is readable in sunlight, their solar panel laptop will not be very useful.
What do you want with an office package on a phone or tablet anyway? Are there really any people who write lengthy documents on their glossy, greasy tablet touch screens?
Really, this telephone and tablet hype bullshit is just becoming ridiculous.
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don't toss stones, as EVERY first world nation is doing this. Where you live is no more 'innocent'..
That's complete bullshit: #1 you have no fucking clue what other intelligence agencies are doing or not, and #2 there are good reasons to believe that most other nations don't even remotely have the budget to pull this off, and #3 policies and intel priorities differ vastly from nation to nation.
I'm more worried that they're saying he was "brilliant."
Yeah, well, that's because they want to portrait him as a brilliant evil genuis who should be incarcerated for the rest of his life (as he's obviously so dangerous) rather than just a guy who downloaded stuff on his thumbdrive because their internal security was shit.
I don't see any sort of automated analysis whose results are presented only to the recipient of the e-mail as a breach of privacy of the sender, who sent the information to the recipient.
But the information is also shared with the NSA and law enforcement agencies. We know that already. It could (and likely will) be used for proactive punishment of thought crimes.
Moreover, what you call "content analysis" is also a technical term from the intersection of corpus linguistics and psychology. Just by analysing text you can obtain a complete and fairly accurate personality profile of a person. Try out for example LIWC and see for yourself.
It's not harmless technology by any measure, it's a pretty big deal.
You're missing the point, which is that Dropbox did bad by obfuscating the code, because they should have made it Open Source right from the start and focus on selling their server-side hosting services. Keeping client code proprietary when it involves security and encryption of possibly confidential data is virtually always bad practise (outside the realm of embedded military applications using tamper-proof chips, perhaps).
There is no invasion and no bloodlust here.
Nevertheless, it's the same rhetorics again and again. "We have proof" without actually presenting it.
...like all digital watches without hands. Sorry, 'smart watches' will never be relevant for anyone but a few geeks without taste.
But perhaps not the 'enhanced edition', haven't tried it yet but heard it doesn't work on some laptops. Or, Neverwinter online.
They do not need to do real-time processing of the data: that is only necessary for filtering.
They do real-time processing, though.
However, real-time processing does not need to introduce any more delays than mere capturing would do, namely almost zero in both cases if the traffic is unencrypted. To be fair, a MitM attack on a VPN probably would introduce a delay.
It's just amusing to me to see NSA as the scapegoat of the day
It's not amusing.
Well, I'd enter one of those cars if its software was open source. Want to see how it is programmed first.
It is used by Windows 8 and TPM 2.0 will be mandatory for all Windows 8.1 certified machines starting from 2015. It's part of a long-term strategy to introduce BIOS/UEFI-level digital rights management into consumer operating systems. The central idea behind all this is to bind the customer to the OS maker forever, make it hard to switch to alternative operating systems, and control application dispatch via app centers and application whitelisting instead of malware blacklisting.
After the tremendous success of locked-down phone hardware, managers in large corporations have come to think of the idea of a general computation device as a real threat, especially in light of free software that is starting to become more of a nuisance to software makers. They want to sell you new shit every 3 years, whereas the times where you need new shit every 3 years are long gone since computers have become fast enough for all everyday computing tasks. Hence, they really need control of the platform as a whole, from hardware over software dispatch to the software itself, and they form business alliances to achieve this goal.
My guess is a change of title, too.
I don't understand why the news and journals report what the NSA announces. For a long time this agency didn't even exist officially. They are allowed and expected to lie about absolutely everything, there are not even reliable records on how many people they employ. Their official statements are and have always been deliberate bullshit and disinformation. It's pointless to take into account anything they say about themselves at all.
Doesn't matter at all. It's a US company and they have full access to your machine. Or is the endpoint software open source and has been compiled and security audited by yourself?
It's not totally useless. If the NSA officially provided encrypted cloud storage for free or cheap, this might be interesting to US American companies and people who want to protect their data against others and have nothing against being snooped on by their own government. Heck, some people would probably give up their freedom and democratic principles for a glass of free beer.
You'd be wrong if you believed that. There's no law that says they can't encrypt a users data.
Nice phrasing. But there is a law that says they have to decrypt it for the US government without anyone ever telling about it, which is exactly the reason why Lavabit and Silent Circle gave up their business.
It's just that the bar to make web apps is a billion times lower than it is to write native code.
What do you mean by that? It's a hundred times easier and less complicated to make an app in, say, Lazarus or Qt than to create a working web app of any kind.
Javascript in Google's V8 is never worse than 20 times slower than C and never uses more than 24 times as much memory.
That is really bad performance, though. Think about it: 20 times slower, 20 times higher memory usage... if you'd use this for anything serious, it would bring even the fastest home PC or laptop to its knees. The good news is that nobody really uses web apps for anything serious (except web mail), they are mainly used for wasting time and jerking around. In other words, web apps and native apps are two different classes altogether - different users, different purposes, different markets.
For a start, he's not posting as an anonymous coward like you. That makes his opinion much more valuable already.
Is there any way to program these things with a conventional programming language and conventional APIs? If so, I'll buy one.
By "conventional" I mean an API with functions like "open a new view/window, add an edit field and a pushbutton, if the pushbutton is pressed, do this and that with the edit field, store a file on the phone, etc." without ever having to touch HTML, XML or any other horrible web crap. I don't want to have to design simple phone applications as if they were client/server apps.
There are plenty of A4 readers...
Where? One DIN A4 page is 8.27 x 11.69 inch. I've heard about prototypes, but haven't seen a single e-ink reader of this size so far anywhere, neither in shops nor on the Net as a product that can actually be purchased. Readers of this size don't exist.
Regarding epub formats, as a researcher at university I'm reading "professionally" - I absolutely need the original pagination. PDF is a must. I'm not even sure whether ebook formats can be referenced/quoted at all and certainly have never seen references to them in a journal. PDFs yes, other formats, No.
So how do you explain the difference in price between hardcovers and paperbacks? Do you even read books?
Moreover, for some people even the largest e-ink readers have too small displays, so they aren't buying any e-books at all.
For example, I'm reading mostly technical texts with lots of formulas. Until there is a large enough e-ink reader that can gracefully display any PDF without zooming, I'll have to stick with traditional books. I already have thousands of them so a few more won't hurt (that's what I tell myself when I order them, until I have to move...)
Crypto AG with their backdoors are also based in Switzerland. More information.
In a nutshell, you cannot trust such companies unless they open source all their software and make the way they operate very transparent. Even then, you should better think twice to whom you give away your trade secrets.
Encryption is always good, especially triple symmetric encryption using TEMK with different algorithms and two passphrases. For example, you could write a program that fills a USB stick with encrypted random keys, one for you with your key and one for the recipient with his own key, and derives session keys from that using a user-defined offset (which could be a word, for instance). One direct key exchange from person to person can suffice for years of secure sessions as long as both parties manage to keep their USB sticks and matserpassphrases safe.
False flag keywords are a bad idea, though. They don't work and only help the NSA to compile lists of activists who are particularly critical of the government and its apparatus. (Not that they cannot compile such a list with a simple query already.)
Has anyone ever tried using a laptop in the sun?
Yeah, I'm using one in the sun almost daily and it sucks. Luckily, mine has a mate screen. Unfortunately, there seems to be only one company, California-based Clover Systems who sell laptops with Pixelq screen (except for OLPC who are unusable for serious work). There modded netbooks are a bit pricey, though. Still I'm tempted to order one some day.
So yes, without a display that is readable in sunlight, their solar panel laptop will not be very useful.
What do you want with an office package on a phone or tablet anyway? Are there really any people who write lengthy documents on their glossy, greasy tablet touch screens?
Really, this telephone and tablet hype bullshit is just becoming ridiculous.