GPS now calls the cops whether you want it to or not. Please tell me I'm paranoid again; I've built a lovely collection of I-told-you-so's. The GPS function of a phone is primarily a tracking device, and we are now smoking, charcoal-broiled frogs.
What "terrorists"? If a "terrorist" wants to blow something up, they'll put a bomb in a car on a freeway or leave it on a railroad track. Americans are fixated on planes. You can't stop bombs, not really. The fact is, we are not finding bombs all over the place. "Terrorists" are rare. In the US, they have all been right-wing groups, usually racist or fundamentalist nuts. The bombs are place in clinics that provide women's services, or, last year, on a bench awaiting a Martin Luther King day parade (guess who the target was). Mics and cameras and police states are useless if you ignore the real terrorists... because they have a lot of popular national support. Brown people blowing up planes - rare. Militias awaiting the need to rise up and smite Obama - millions of them.
Tor will be illegal/compromised shortly. Or the ISPs will make the use of Tor an offense under their terms of service, and shut the nodes down. The new worldwide police state ain't gonna let you operate an encrypted network for long.
Zimmerman and PGP opened a back door to their encryption on orders of the US spooks years ago - hence GPG, an open-source alternative that the spooks don't backdoor.
Why o why would I let them have my encrypted voice communications when I know full well they'll hand the keys to the spooks?
That wasn't what I addressed. Of course they could tap phones, and they did - with court orders and with records of their taps. One at a time. At least they had to show an interest.
But now they are listening to ALL OUR CALLS. ALL OF THEM. And when the NSA gets that data center in Utah online next year, they will record. every. single. call. All the web pages visits. No exceptions. No warrants. They will be able to run a timeline backwards on anyone or any group of associates to go a-huntin' crimes or anti-government activity. Forever.
Address that, not the straw man. We lived in a world without 24/7 spying on every damned thing we do, and now we do, because 1) no cultural memory of a time when it wasn't so 2) kids raised with no civil liberty at school don't get why no liberties as an adult is bad and 3) the tech has changed and 4) the national security state has really metastasized and is spreading across the world as fast as we can sell the equipment.
Bull. You are revising living memory. Of course it existed. It existed fifteen years ago, everywhere. The tech to listen in on all calls did not exist, nor was it legal. It was absolutely, constitutionally ILLEGAL to spy on citizens in the USA. We talked on the phone and messaged each other in the happy knowledge that it took a court order or Scientology operatives to obtain phone conversations or internet activity. Such things are possible today because our citizens are technologically and politcally illiterate and have absolutely no cultural memory past ALF reruns. The US is stupiding itself to death. OF COURSE WE HAD PRIVACY!! You gave it up!
Who is providing the software and hardware for the deep filtering? Who are the scum? It's like peddling POS tablets for pedophile brothels. Who the hell is providing police state software to imprison the population?
And this is what happens when you really make a tool to end-run police states, such as the US or the UK. They make it illegal and imprison you. Ask Assange.
Please explain, as almost all did ten years ago, why such rantings about "they" tracking us were paranoid delusions, and how no-one cares what you are doing. I'd like that trip down memory lane. Yes, I am vindicated and bitter. Deservedly so.
GPS for cell phones IS for tracking everyone in real time (whether you switch it "OFF" or not, it's software, they switch it back on), they WILL mandate tracking for cars, voting computer systems ARE intended for Republicans to steal elections at will and will soon serve the same function for conservatives in Canada, they have mandated every damned motherboard in the last ten years a spying/tracking device, and the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Looking forward to further vindication, and possibly a large bottle of scotch whiskey. Daily.
This demonstrates why ISPs, as private businesses, have to be taken over by national or local governments. They claim they can't run fiber to the home because it is too costly. Yet they make billions in profits they promptly take out of the business. They will spend endless cash to serve the needs of our new financial robber barons, however, as they know who they are really working for.
Public utilities are cheaper. Faster. And respond to the wishes of the people paying for the damned things. Run fiber to our homes, and let the local governments pay for it, or the provincial or national governments if that can't happen. It's not brain surgery. The few who have been permitted to do so provide terabytes a month for pennies, because they are not committed to robbing the customers blind. Let's do a Norway-fires-the-oil-companies and take back what should be our internet.
Cheaper, better, faster. There is nothing keeping us from that than our new national religions demanding all services be profit-raising private corporations. We are fishes trained to gut ourselves, and it's time we stopped.
If I request a domain, I have to publish my name and address. And it has to be the real name and real address where they can find me, else [throat-cutting-motion].
Wealthy people paying 180,000+ USD per app: they expect PRIVACY, goddammit. And they apparently get it. And if they fail to get it, big problem.
Ruling class/serfs. People with absolute privacy/people who can never expect a moment alone with a phone or browser without someone logging the event. Bosses/scum. Corporatocracy means never having to say I'm sorry - it suffices to merely say "Fuck you." This is what happens when the mask drops, liberalism dies, and the real bosses take over. Not a shred of decency, nor none expected.
And ICANN is supposed to be a goddamed traffic cop, not a billion dollar business. They are becoming a new boss, albeit it seems one who grovels before the wishes of the wealthy. Who died and elected them king? Or the USA, for that matter? We need a new internet.
In the poor schools in Chicago, our desert was a square of Jello with a lettuce leaf embedded. We didn't get no raisins. Suburban kids, they don't get it, grumble.
"Iran should have known better, how, and how would they get around using Windows even if they wanted to - the equipment they buy is welded to Microsoft. I doubt there are many open sourced centrifuge software packages."
Sorry, editing leftover there. Wish I could remember the clever snippet, but can't.
Our gerontologists and general culture freak out at the concept of curtailing or repairing the genetically caused damage that we call the aging process. Career suicide to say that something could possibly be done, someday, if we start trying to find out how.
If dying of old age is natural and expected, then so should dying of cancer be. Neither are pleasant deaths, and should be eliminated as causes. But one is being done, and the other not, for largely religious and superstitious reasons. Odd that our greatest fear is our greatest blind spot in medical research.
If we ever lick even a part of the puzzle, it'll be by accident. Let's hope.
Ray Bradbury. One of the damned greats. Almost the last of the Campbellian era of science fiction, when we actually called it by its right name.
Flame is using tech that is not Stuxnet-related... this is beyond Israel's and the US's not-so-secret war with Iran. This code means that no Windows machine in the world that uses MS updating will ever be trustworthy... unless you apply a huge dose of collective amnesia and shoulder-shrugging denial.
Question: is there a collusion between some dark back office at MS and the spooks, thru which the spooks get digitally signed certificates? Is the "bug" intentional? MS and Apple have been quietly cooperating with the FBI, NSA and the spooks almost since day one... how much? Are we just seeing the corner of the machine?
Is Linux or BSD safe? I don't mean from a man-in-the-middle attack; I mean a man-under-your-feet attack. What if chip or mobo makers install cracks in the hardware itself, on the order of US (and Chinese) spooks? I don't think we can trust the hardware made in the last ten years or so. We may have to go to printing our mobos someday - and how then would you trust the mobo designs didn't have backdoors in their software, somehow, or in updateable firmware?
Iran should have known better, how, and how would they get around using Windows even if they wanted to - the equipment they buy is welded to Microsoft. I doubt there are many open sourced centrifuge software packages.
Flame is not "Arab-centric". The tool kit exists now, and it will spread around the world. Every micro-generation has to learn the same lesson... and promptly to forget it: dump Windows. It's beyond compromised. That's why businesses and spooks like it. It defines police state software... sigh.
Hubble is just a Keystone spy sat turned the wrong way. All those "military" shuttle flights were probably launching the fleet of secret Hubbles that were pointing down at us. The Air Force demanded that the original Shuttle, which was smaller and cheaper, be turned into a Keystone truck if NASA wanted backing for the Shuttle back in '72-'74 (Jerry Grey, Shuttle).
To become the flying spysat truck, they added on the solid rocket boosters... which kludge caused the explosion of the Shuttle in '86.
And we're about to defund our space program, while they had endless free money on the spook side to launch a fleet of Hubbles... goddammitttt....
Economic fundamentalism. Refusal to believe government can do anything right, simultaneously believing that business and markets can solve all problems for ever-growing profit. Non-profit operation by government vs. profit model. Without brakes put on by regulation, we are being drained by vampire gods of finance. That giant sucking sound your hear is our money going up and out, not stopping to build or fix anything before it disappears into the Caymans. Example: Social Security administion costs are something like 1-3% of yearly intake. 401Ks and IRAs demand something like 5-10%. The difference? Sheer profit.
Profits that used to go to the customer in the form of investment in the business and better service and product, or dividends on company shares. That money is now taken out of the company and invested or hoarded elsewhere, anywhere but the company that made it. Conglomerates that buy power companies and cut maintenance drastically, boosting profit and stock price, until the blackouts predictably come. Private investors buying British Rail lines and immediately cutting maintenance costs, and soon came the derailments. There are no consequences for refusing to invest profits, and infinite wealth to be made anywhere but the business itself.
In the 70s, corporations moved from the dividend model, in which they paid shareholders part of the profits, to the new model in which they move the profits out of the company, to the joy of Wall Street which rewards them with higher stock prices. To keep the new model going, they don't require investment in infrastructure; they simply need to keep up the game of musical chairs, prompting people to buy stock on the sole hope that the price will eternally go up - which it can't - and pump all the profits into their own pockets and the accounts of Wall Street financiers. It's a scam, and we've lost our industries, can't build internet infrastructure, and are watching bubble after bubble swell and burst. Tax laws did most of this; they de-regged and sweetened disinvestment in plant on the say-so of the finance lords.
Change the tax laws, drag the money back from overseas, change the stock market model back to dividend payout instead of casino gambling. In short, stablize the financial model and kick out the silver-tongued thieves who built this up for the last 40 years. Mandate that corporations invest in their own businesses, rather than buy others. Mandate that, once and for all, they are creatures of the government, licensed and regulated, and exist for the purpose of employing the people of the nation which granted them the privilege of their sheltered existences. Oh, and nationalize the oil companies, as Norway did. Create a state bank for each state, as North Dakota did. Kick banks out of the stock market and derivatives, and mandate they do their damned jobs, which are to distribute the free money we give them from the Fed, not to make infinitely growing profit. In short, kick out the lying greedy sacks, and go back to 1965's model, when we could actually DO anything. Government didn't do this, the Chicago School of economics did. And oh yes, get rid of the voting computers and go back to hand counts, as Canada does, or you won't be able to vote up the sun rising in the east. No use wanting to change if the voting system is completely owned by the bastards who are destroying your economy. Without the ability to vote, your are playing with mud while the bosses laugh at you. If they aren't altering elections wholesale, they are surely doing it retail. And the future is not today; election alteration will be as common as slapping a bribe on a table used to be.
Well, almost all of the things your listed were built by our grandparents. Since our grandparents didn't build fiber-to-the-house infrastructure, apparently it is not possible for us to even attempt to do so.
And a lot of those things, such as roads, garbage service, water supply, rail, and power, were built by our governments using tax money - which is absolutely forbidden in today's climate of economic religious fundamentalism which demands that all infrastructure creation and related services must be done by entrepreneurs - who have shown they cannot do what the governments of our grandparents did for less than an infinitely growing multiple of what the grandparents paid. Governments build and maintain for the lowest possible cost for the maximum possible return, while our new privatization model demands lowest tolerable service levels for a maximum, and ever-growing per quarter, return on investment. We will never have fiber to the house - with the exception of the very wealthy, of course.
Translation: Since I will lose the argument vis-a-vis USA vs. The Way Everyone Else Provides Internet, I will shut down the conversation preemptively by spouting something meaningless yet somehow jingoistic. Good for you.
The thing about H1B; it's not necessarily cheaper to hire them. What they represent is a workforce that can't complain about salary, can't leave your employ, can't offend you in any way - or the hard work is wasted, you can sack them, and they are instantly deported. Hot diggety, you've got indentured servants! No-lip super service with a smile. A gentile sort of slavery, without the actual chains.
Slashdot Mirror
GPS now calls the cops whether you want it to or not. Please tell me I'm paranoid again; I've built a lovely collection of I-told-you-so's. The GPS function of a phone is primarily a tracking device, and we are now smoking, charcoal-broiled frogs.
"And private businesses have the right to refuse to sell to anyone for any reason."
Well, then, I'll get those "No Colored People Allowed" signs back up again, Ron Paul.
What "terrorists"? If a "terrorist" wants to blow something up, they'll put a bomb in a car on a freeway or leave it on a railroad track. Americans are fixated on planes. You can't stop bombs, not really. The fact is, we are not finding bombs all over the place. "Terrorists" are rare. In the US, they have all been right-wing groups, usually racist or fundamentalist nuts. The bombs are place in clinics that provide women's services, or, last year, on a bench awaiting a Martin Luther King day parade (guess who the target was). Mics and cameras and police states are useless if you ignore the real terrorists... because they have a lot of popular national support. Brown people blowing up planes - rare. Militias awaiting the need to rise up and smite Obama - millions of them.
Tor will be illegal/compromised shortly. Or the ISPs will make the use of Tor an offense under their terms of service, and shut the nodes down. The new worldwide police state ain't gonna let you operate an encrypted network for long.
Zimmerman and PGP opened a back door to their encryption on orders of the US spooks years ago - hence GPG, an open-source alternative that the spooks don't backdoor.
Why o why would I let them have my encrypted voice communications when I know full well they'll hand the keys to the spooks?
That wasn't what I addressed. Of course they could tap phones, and they did - with court orders and with records of their taps. One at a time. At least they had to show an interest.
But now they are listening to ALL OUR CALLS. ALL OF THEM. And when the NSA gets that data center in Utah online next year, they will record. every. single. call. All the web pages visits. No exceptions. No warrants. They will be able to run a timeline backwards on anyone or any group of associates to go a-huntin' crimes or anti-government activity. Forever.
Address that, not the straw man. We lived in a world without 24/7 spying on every damned thing we do, and now we do, because 1) no cultural memory of a time when it wasn't so 2) kids raised with no civil liberty at school don't get why no liberties as an adult is bad and 3) the tech has changed and 4) the national security state has really metastasized and is spreading across the world as fast as we can sell the equipment.
Bull. You are revising living memory. Of course it existed. It existed fifteen years ago, everywhere. The tech to listen in on all calls did not exist, nor was it legal. It was absolutely, constitutionally ILLEGAL to spy on citizens in the USA. We talked on the phone and messaged each other in the happy knowledge that it took a court order or Scientology operatives to obtain phone conversations or internet activity. Such things are possible today because our citizens are technologically and politcally illiterate and have absolutely no cultural memory past ALF reruns. The US is stupiding itself to death. OF COURSE WE HAD PRIVACY!! You gave it up!
Who is providing the software and hardware for the deep filtering? Who are the scum? It's like peddling POS tablets for pedophile brothels. Who the hell is providing police state software to imprison the population?
And this is what happens when you really make a tool to end-run police states, such as the US or the UK. They make it illegal and imprison you. Ask Assange.
Please explain, as almost all did ten years ago, why such rantings about "they" tracking us were paranoid delusions, and how no-one cares what you are doing. I'd like that trip down memory lane. Yes, I am vindicated and bitter. Deservedly so.
GPS for cell phones IS for tracking everyone in real time (whether you switch it "OFF" or not, it's software, they switch it back on), they WILL mandate tracking for cars, voting computer systems ARE intended for Republicans to steal elections at will and will soon serve the same function for conservatives in Canada, they have mandated every damned motherboard in the last ten years a spying/tracking device, and the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Looking forward to further vindication, and possibly a large bottle of scotch whiskey. Daily.
This demonstrates why ISPs, as private businesses, have to be taken over by national or local governments. They claim they can't run fiber to the home because it is too costly. Yet they make billions in profits they promptly take out of the business. They will spend endless cash to serve the needs of our new financial robber barons, however, as they know who they are really working for.
Public utilities are cheaper. Faster. And respond to the wishes of the people paying for the damned things. Run fiber to our homes, and let the local governments pay for it, or the provincial or national governments if that can't happen. It's not brain surgery. The few who have been permitted to do so provide terabytes a month for pennies, because they are not committed to robbing the customers blind. Let's do a Norway-fires-the-oil-companies and take back what should be our internet.
Cheaper, better, faster. There is nothing keeping us from that than our new national religions demanding all services be profit-raising private corporations. We are fishes trained to gut ourselves, and it's time we stopped.
If I request a domain, I have to publish my name and address. And it has to be the real name and real address where they can find me, else [throat-cutting-motion].
Wealthy people paying 180,000+ USD per app: they expect PRIVACY, goddammit. And they apparently get it. And if they fail to get it, big problem.
Ruling class/serfs. People with absolute privacy/people who can never expect a moment alone with a phone or browser without someone logging the event. Bosses/scum. Corporatocracy means never having to say I'm sorry - it suffices to merely say "Fuck you." This is what happens when the mask drops, liberalism dies, and the real bosses take over. Not a shred of decency, nor none expected.
And ICANN is supposed to be a goddamed traffic cop, not a billion dollar business. They are becoming a new boss, albeit it seems one who grovels before the wishes of the wealthy. Who died and elected them king? Or the USA, for that matter? We need a new internet.
In the poor schools in Chicago, our desert was a square of Jello with a lettuce leaf embedded. We didn't get no raisins. Suburban kids, they don't get it, grumble.
"Microsoft has fixed more security holes than all the other software companies on the planet combined. "
No other company had even remotely needed to fix millions of holes. Microsoft is unique.
"Iran should have known better, how, and how would they get around using Windows even if they wanted to - the equipment they buy is welded to Microsoft. I doubt there are many open sourced centrifuge software packages."
Sorry, editing leftover there. Wish I could remember the clever snippet, but can't.
Our gerontologists and general culture freak out at the concept of curtailing or repairing the genetically caused damage that we call the aging process. Career suicide to say that something could possibly be done, someday, if we start trying to find out how.
If dying of old age is natural and expected, then so should dying of cancer be. Neither are pleasant deaths, and should be eliminated as causes. But one is being done, and the other not, for largely religious and superstitious reasons. Odd that our greatest fear is our greatest blind spot in medical research.
If we ever lick even a part of the puzzle, it'll be by accident. Let's hope.
Ray Bradbury. One of the damned greats. Almost the last of the Campbellian era of science fiction, when we actually called it by its right name.
Flame is using tech that is not Stuxnet-related... this is beyond Israel's and the US's not-so-secret war with Iran. This code means that no Windows machine in the world that uses MS updating will ever be trustworthy... unless you apply a huge dose of collective amnesia and shoulder-shrugging denial.
Question: is there a collusion between some dark back office at MS and the spooks, thru which the spooks get digitally signed certificates? Is the "bug" intentional? MS and Apple have been quietly cooperating with the FBI, NSA and the spooks almost since day one... how much? Are we just seeing the corner of the machine?
Is Linux or BSD safe? I don't mean from a man-in-the-middle attack; I mean a man-under-your-feet attack. What if chip or mobo makers install cracks in the hardware itself, on the order of US (and Chinese) spooks? I don't think we can trust the hardware made in the last ten years or so. We may have to go to printing our mobos someday - and how then would you trust the mobo designs didn't have backdoors in their software, somehow, or in updateable firmware?
Iran should have known better, how, and how would they get around using Windows even if they wanted to - the equipment they buy is welded to Microsoft. I doubt there are many open sourced centrifuge software packages.
Flame is not "Arab-centric". The tool kit exists now, and it will spread around the world. Every micro-generation has to learn the same lesson... and promptly to forget it: dump Windows. It's beyond compromised. That's why businesses and spooks like it. It defines police state software... sigh.
"On the 4th of June 2012, on this spot, the Space Shuttle Enterprise crashed into this bridge."
Details are not that important. Awesome plaqueage is.
Hubble is just a Keystone spy sat turned the wrong way. All those "military" shuttle flights were probably launching the fleet of secret Hubbles that were pointing down at us. The Air Force demanded that the original Shuttle, which was smaller and cheaper, be turned into a Keystone truck if NASA wanted backing for the Shuttle back in '72-'74 (Jerry Grey, Shuttle).
To become the flying spysat truck, they added on the solid rocket boosters... which kludge caused the explosion of the Shuttle in '86.
And we're about to defund our space program, while they had endless free money on the spook side to launch a fleet of Hubbles... goddammitttt....
Ladies and gentlemen: Why NASA never has enough money.
Economic fundamentalism. Refusal to believe government can do anything right, simultaneously believing that business and markets can solve all problems for ever-growing profit. Non-profit operation by government vs. profit model. Without brakes put on by regulation, we are being drained by vampire gods of finance. That giant sucking sound your hear is our money going up and out, not stopping to build or fix anything before it disappears into the Caymans.
Example: Social Security administion costs are something like 1-3% of yearly intake. 401Ks and IRAs demand something like 5-10%. The difference? Sheer profit.
Profits that used to go to the customer in the form of investment in the business and better service and product, or dividends on company shares. That money is now taken out of the company and invested or hoarded elsewhere, anywhere but the company that made it. Conglomerates that buy power companies and cut maintenance drastically, boosting profit and stock price, until the blackouts predictably come. Private investors buying British Rail lines and immediately cutting maintenance costs, and soon came the derailments. There are no consequences for refusing to invest profits, and infinite wealth to be made anywhere but the business itself.
In the 70s, corporations moved from the dividend model, in which they paid shareholders part of the profits, to the new model in which they move the profits out of the company, to the joy of Wall Street which rewards them with higher stock prices. To keep the new model going, they don't require investment in infrastructure; they simply need to keep up the game of musical chairs, prompting people to buy stock on the sole hope that the price will eternally go up - which it can't - and pump all the profits into their own pockets and the accounts of Wall Street financiers. It's a scam, and we've lost our industries, can't build internet infrastructure, and are watching bubble after bubble swell and burst. Tax laws did most of this; they de-regged and sweetened disinvestment in plant on the say-so of the finance lords.
Change the tax laws, drag the money back from overseas, change the stock market model back to dividend payout instead of casino gambling. In short, stablize the financial model and kick out the silver-tongued thieves who built this up for the last 40 years. Mandate that corporations invest in their own businesses, rather than buy others. Mandate that, once and for all, they are creatures of the government, licensed and regulated, and exist for the purpose of employing the people of the nation which granted them the privilege of their sheltered existences. Oh, and nationalize the oil companies, as Norway did. Create a state bank for each state, as North Dakota did. Kick banks out of the stock market and derivatives, and mandate they do their damned jobs, which are to distribute the free money we give them from the Fed, not to make infinitely growing profit. In short, kick out the lying greedy sacks, and go back to 1965's model, when we could actually DO anything. Government didn't do this, the Chicago School of economics did. And oh yes, get rid of the voting computers and go back to hand counts, as Canada does, or you won't be able to vote up the sun rising in the east. No use wanting to change if the voting system is completely owned by the bastards who are destroying your economy. Without the ability to vote, your are playing with mud while the bosses laugh at you. If they aren't altering elections wholesale, they are surely doing it retail. And the future is not today; election alteration will be as common as slapping a bribe on a table used to be.
Well, almost all of the things your listed were built by our grandparents. Since our grandparents didn't build fiber-to-the-house infrastructure, apparently it is not possible for us to even attempt to do so.
And a lot of those things, such as roads, garbage service, water supply, rail, and power, were built by our governments using tax money - which is absolutely forbidden in today's climate of economic religious fundamentalism which demands that all infrastructure creation and related services must be done by entrepreneurs - who have shown they cannot do what the governments of our grandparents did for less than an infinitely growing multiple of what the grandparents paid. Governments build and maintain for the lowest possible cost for the maximum possible return, while our new privatization model demands lowest tolerable service levels for a maximum, and ever-growing per quarter, return on investment. We will never have fiber to the house - with the exception of the very wealthy, of course.
Translation: Since I will lose the argument vis-a-vis USA vs. The Way Everyone Else Provides Internet, I will shut down the conversation preemptively by spouting something meaningless yet somehow jingoistic. Good for you.
The thing about H1B; it's not necessarily cheaper to hire them. What they represent is a workforce that can't complain about salary, can't leave your employ, can't offend you in any way - or the hard work is wasted, you can sack them, and they are instantly deported. Hot diggety, you've got indentured servants! No-lip super service with a smile. A gentile sort of slavery, without the actual chains.
Worked fine for them the last 25 years. No doubt a raise in the number of H1B visa/indentured servants permitted into the US is on the table soon.