Let's assume half of them are looking at foreign traffic and half at domestic traffic.
Bad assumption. The NSA's primary focus is foreign surveillance. It's right there in their mission statement that the tin foil hat brigade apparently has never read. The only reason they have taps on wires domestically is because much of internet travel originates, passes through, or is destined for, an IP address located outside of the US. Even the President of the United States has said as much. The NSA does gather information for domestic surveillance operations, but it's disengenuous to suggest they are providing high level analytics along with the captured data -- their role within the government is to gather intelligence, sort it, package it, and provide a deliverable intelligence product to other organizations. The NSA is basically tech support for the FBI, CIA, DHS, DEA, etc.
What makes you think you are special enough to deserve their attention?
When I was born, my mom thought I'd be President of the United States or some-such. Maybe they're just pre-emptively guarding me for my future ascention to the throne, did you consider that?:P
Personally, I'm much more concerned about the way commercial organizations are spying on us.
As am I. People yell at me on Slashdot all the time: "Why do you use Tor?! It's been compromised by the NSA!" Okay, sure... but who said I care about the NSA? I mean really guys...
Of course, there are those that worry about cops knowing when they are calling their drug supplier to set up a buy, but all indications so far is that the data is not available to regular police organizations.
Let me put the actual risk in perspective. I know someone who is on parole for a previous drug conviction. This individual regularly uses their cell phone, much of it via text messages, to arrange drug deals. So here we have an ex-felon, on parole, who is trading in Schedule I drugs on a daily basis, using what has been widely panned as the single biggest device used by the NSA to track us all... No black helicopters have come for this individual to date, and this person has been doing it for two years so far.
Guys, be glad you aren't getting all the government you're paying for. I mean it; for all this crap about government surveillance on everyone... there's a shockingly low amount of critical thinking going on about how, exactly, the government would go about doing this with its existing labor and financial resources.
Seems like a bad and unprofessional idea to just announce it's a honeypot.
Not if you're an attention whore and a wanna-be internet vigilante.
An anti-piracy stance (in the typical MPAA fashion) is a very unpopular one on the internet. There's nothing to gain.
Well, there is something to gain; it's blackmail material. That's what the MPAA/RIAA use it for, and there's no reason you couldn't sell the information to a third party to try and extort money from them "If you don't pay us to keep quiet, we'll reveal your illegal activity to the authorities." I mean, that's pretty much classic blackmail. The data he has does have value, and if you view this announcement as a bid for potential buyers of his data, then it suddenly makes sense.
The announcement is a false flag; It isn't a signal to us that he's turning the information over to authorities, it's a signal to the criminal community to come forward and begin bidding. Now instead of it being "bad and unprofessional", it's a clever way of acquiring plausible deniability by appearing to be retarded.
Sounds more like some script kiddie who is pulling some prank or what have you. But apparently tracking down who was behind was just handed to us on a silver platter, right here. Names and address included.
Not a script kiddie; a paid industry shill. And as is typical for idiot hacktivists, a simple google search without a deeper understanding of business filings reveals that it's fingering the wrong guy; They failed to check for legally registered aliases. Incomplete investigations are incompetent investigations. Hasn't the Boston Bomber Reddit Witchunt taught us anything, Internet?
You cannot conduct a proper investigation using just google. Google is exploratory not confirmatory, and if you act on this information you will likely be exposing yourself to far more legal liability than using some badly designed "honeypot" website.
When you opt not to speak out against the government out of fear of reprisal, then you effectively have lost your right to free speech. Forums like Slashdot need to embrace the use of proxies like Tor, etc., instead of shutting them down with giant ugly off-red pages saying "Blocked!" Anonymization services like Tor are invaluable for creating a safe haven for free speech; in countries like Iran, North Korea, United States, France, Iraq, and Egypt, people are being harassed, arrested and imprisoned for chastizing the government for being a police state. We need websites to publish information about these governments' activities for the world to see, and sites like Slashdot that block Tor and similar technology are simply enabling those governments to build a digital iron curtain around themselves to lock down political dissent.
said to be recommending the establishment by the Government of Antigua & Barbuda of a statutory body to own, manage and operate the ultimate platform to be created for the monetisation or other exploitation of the suspension of American intellectual property rights authorised
Why does this press release read like an EULA? I mean that is a retarded amount of long words to describe a very simple idea. Why can't they just write it up as "We're bringing back fair use, bitches!"
Actually it's exactly the strategy in use on the Surface RT. Apple will at least let you install software from third party sources, the RT doesn't. Mind you Microsoft modeled this strategy after Apple's so I guess you could blame Apple.
Yes I know. I was trying to be snarky. Alas, the internet has yet to come up with the much-needed [SNARK] HTML tag.
We'll make the operating system and hardware completely closed... make sure that we take away the ability to install software that hasn't been approved. We'll do this through a centralized market place where every application is signed and approved. Now the signing agency... get a cut of 30%.
Dude, you just described Apple's marketing strategy, not Microsoft RT.
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You're reading a lot into my jokey original one-sentence post. Grievance (grevance)? I've used PHP. Found it wanting. Moved on. End of story. What's driving your zealous PHP advocacy?
I'm not. It's a popular language that is also used on many major web sites. This suggests to me that your various statements about it being "found wanting" are in error. Especially when you have failed to offer an alternative. You criticized something because it was less than perfect. The exact same argument can be made for everything. Ever. It's a logical fallacy, and you got upmodded for it, and my pointing it out got me mod-bombed.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Ironic" for some posts.
Re:It was already a dangerous site to visit ...
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I'm no troll. I was there (on the internet, not physically present) when Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web and I happened to notice while using Gopher.
I was on the internet, er, before it was the internet. -_- That doesn't mean anything as far as statements made about today.
I've spent considerable time since regretting my early advocacy and plenty of time fixing PHP driven sites or migrating away from PHP to better platforms. Plenty of other people over the years have explained why PHP is a 'fractal of bad design', so I won't make that attempt here. I agree with them.
I calmly stand by my snark, perched atop the mountain of experience.
And I stand by my statements, that PHP would be one of my top picks for back-end design and dynamic pages. It is easy to read, has reasonably good performance, and reasonable security. But no language can stop people from shooting their own foot off if they're so determined, and your grevance seems to be not with the language itself, but with the fact that so many people shoot their own foot off while using it. The only problem I have with PHP is that the designers seem utterly incapable of understanding OOP concepts and the result is half-baked objects. But then, I say the same thing about Java.
If it's personal use, why aren't you using your own computer?
Possibly because a personal laptop can do work-related activities just fine, and many in fact prefer using their own devices over what is company-issued. Nonetheless, many pieces of software allow remote monitoring regardless of who owns the equipment.
Why are you using a company phone to make a personal call? Especially in this day and age, when almost everybody has a cell phone....
Possibly because the company allows personal calls as they don't cost anything on a "everything" plan. Possibly because carrying two cell phones is inconvenient. Possibly because you are making business calls using a phone that you own and pay for but use primarily for work-related purposes. Possibly because you have purchased multiple lines for a single phone.
Companies have a right to make sure they receive the contracted services for the money they're paying you.
Actually they don't, unless the contract specifically states this. Most employment contracts do not state specific services to be provided, they only state severance clauses, and leave it to "tasks as assigned" for the work performed.
They also have a right to ensure you aren't misusing/abusing company resources.
They may take reasonable measures to protect company resources... they do not, for example, get to shoot you dead if they find you carrying a laptop out the back door. Sorry if you got confused over what a right is, and is not.
If you're on company time/using company resources, then it should be for the work they're paying you to do.
What if you're an on-call surgeon; You are being paid to be available. That does not mean you may be monitored and tracked during this time.
If your company has a policy that allows you to use company resources for personal use when you're on your own time (just as my company does -- I'm posting this while on break, from my office PC), then you have to expect that they're monitoring it.
Expectation does not create, or override, law.
Of course, I live in a country where we already have those protections. Every single one of the categories you listed has been read into the constitution and human rights/anti-discrimination legislations as protected classes of people.
I live in a country where states are allowed to pass so-called "right to work" legislation and then fire people on the basis of those things, and as long as they do not admit this as the reason for the dismissal, it is perfectly legal. So you can see where I might have a problem with some of these statements you're making; You're operating under false assumptions -- they may be true where you live, but not where I live.
Pervasive electronic monitoring is a strike against that goal.
It doesn't have to be.
There is an old latin phrase: Ad mores natura recurrit damnatos, fixa et mutari nescia . Translated, it means "human nature ever reverts to its depraved courses, fixed and immutable." You're naive if you think that if you leave the barn door open the cows won't get out. They may not make a run for the gate immediately, but they will leave, eventually. The same is true of corporations monitoring their employees -- Where there is power without restraint, there is abuse. This is human nature.
When I say we need to regulate these things, what I mean to say is we need to address the power imbalance present between employers and employees. In this country, the power imbalance is massive; Employees have no recourse for an employer that abuses them or fires them without good cause. And surveillance is a form of abuse. If you don't believe me, let me come over and sit at the foot of your bed and stare at you while you sleep. I promise... I won't do anything. I'll just sit here. Staring.
I don't see what disciplinary action has to do with being forced to pay a union for permission to work in a particular industry.
Since it's clear you haven't actually read the law, "Right to work" allows an employer to fire you for any or no reason, excepting federally-protected reasons (like sexual orientation, sex, race, etc.). It means that any employment contract signed that stipulates a mediation or resolution procedure before an employer can fire you is rendered unenforceable.
Removing right to work is a necessary first step in restoring merit-based employment decisions, instead of arbitrary ones.
Re:It was already a dangerous site to visit ...
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... it introduced visitors to PHP.
Listen troll, PHP is used on a large number of websites, including most of the top 10. Facebook uses a special version of it. It is a solid language with a rich command set and very good performance. If you want to be a web programmer, you better know PHP.
If you wanna bash a technology commonly used by web developers, pick Flash.
How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend on a big dangerous mechanical status symbol? How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend over the next decade for fuel, maintenance, and a place to store your enormous mechanical status symbol?
This is America. The answer is every penny we can. Have you SEEN our military?
The problem is our urban sprawl. It damages our health, destroys our communities, makes infrastructure impractical, and makes cars necessary. So maybe let's do something about it...?
I don't think American culture is willing to tolerate high population density living conditions, and our economy is not in any condition to begin concentrating the population either.
I mean it's not your truck, it's your boss'. It's not your computer and desk, it belongs to your boss. Etc etc.
It's the companies laptop. In your home. It's the company's truck. After hours. It's the company's phone. On a private call.
Misuse of this technology can and will affect employee morale rather sharply.
Right. Because nobody who's morale dropped enough to complain was disciplined. Anywhere. Ever.
I'm sorry, but this is a classic example of where government regulation is needed. Companies have the privilege (not right!) of monitoring their employees. Just like your driver's license isn't a right to drive: It can be revoked. Employers need to be held accountable for overstepping boundaries of reasonableness.
Go ahead and record e-mails, but if it doesn't directly affect the business it should be deleted and no further comment made. Direct managers should be prevented from monitoring their employees electronically -- instead a separate department such as HR should do this, so as to prevent bias. Phone calls should not be monitored once the employee is off the clock. If they have a problem with this, remotely disable the phone at the appointed time. Same with computers with internet access, and other dual-use devices. Keep in mind many people use their personal phone for work-related calls, and likewise with laptops and other electronic devices. Remote evesdropping when you are not actively engaged in company business should be prohibited.
And to seal the deal, we need federal legislation to drop the ban-hammer on so-called "right to work" state legislation; The laws should be written so only conduct which directly impacts the company, while using company resources, can be subject to disciplinary action. In other words, if you don't like JP Morgan's shady business strategies (which led to the subprime mortgage crisis), you should be free to protest on your own time without fear of reprisal.
We need to draw a line that says only conduct that happens on company time or using company resources is subject to any disciplinary action. We need to prohibit employers from taking action against employers punitively on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc. And this is not just about protecting "the little guy"; This is about protecting the country as a whole.
Merit-based employment and strong non-discrimination policies provide a direct and immediate benefit to society by making as many jobs available to as many qualified candidates as possible. It increases labor supply, and rewards companies who hire on the basis of merit with a more competitive and efficient labor force.
Pervasive electronic monitoring is a strike against that goal. I will tell you, being on the other side of the IT version of the 'one-way' glass, that if you watch anyone long enough, you'll find a reason to hate them. You will become judgmental, and you will look at them differently. Which is precisely why managers should never under any circumstances be allowed to covertly monitor their employees. There is no "if" about morale suffering; It starts deteriorating the moment you start.
And managers are notoriously short-sighted, poor judges of character, and often blow things radically out of proportion when they do come across something hinky. Just like the general public did during the hunt for the boston bomber. People who are not trained and experienced in surveillance, who are not impartial to the people being watched, should never, ever, ever be given the reins. Disaster is most often the result.
Only? That sounds like proof of concept rather than a proof of overstatement.
It is only proof that America as a whole, of which NYC is a part of (contrary to popular opinion, who think it is America), has a shockingly low regard for bikers. Take for example, how the Dutch handle bicycling -- they have not just dedicated lanes, but dedicated traffic signals. Bikes are an integrated part of their public transportation system. In the United States, it's viewed as "something children do, or people who haven't grown up." In other words, you're viewed as immature and/or poor if you ride a bike, not environmentally conscious, fiscally prudent, or body smart.
Now I live in the midwest, and several of our cities, to little fanfare, have been adopting the dutch approach. In Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities, we are creating dedicated bike lanes and signals. Minneapolis in particular has an extensive network of inter-city bike trails which it maintains year round. For those who forget, Minneapolis is located at the same lat/long as Moscow, and it regularly gets snowfall of several feet come high winter. Chicago's trains have been installing bike racks in the cars and on buses, though they are seen less than elsewhere during the cold season. New York, for all its bluster about this, barely registers on the scale of bike-friendliness; cyclists there might as well be armed mad-max style and shooting at motorists for as much hostility there is between the two groups, whereas in the midwest, and even along the West coast in places like San Francisco, motorists are much more tolerant of cyclists.
This is starting to change as the millenials come into the workforce and seem decidedly uninterested in owning their own car. I'm not entirely sure why this is happening, because unlike Europe, the population density of America is such that owning a car is pretty much a necessity -- most people who own bikes also own, or at least have access to, a car or other form of motorized transportation. Even in Europe, scooters are a common sight, whereas around here, they're rare indeed.
I guess my point is that while culture plays a role, the bigger hinderance to mass transit and cycling both in the United States is population density. We are really spread out. You could fit several Western Europes into the US, and we don't have nearly as many people per mile as most European countries. The other part of this is that our city's infrastructure has never been flat out replaced. Europe's has -- it was called WWII, when most of their infrastructure was blown up. Your welcome by the way -- we paid for fixing a lot of that. We've never done the same here -- our roads were never reimagined to include bikes, or mini-vehicles, etc. Our urban sprawl continues unabated. And this is, ultimately, why we have so many problems; We're too spread out, and infrastructure costs too damn much, which is why it's only basic. We should have had bullet trains and such a long time ago; But the maintenance costs of all this suburban landscape saps away our budget. And it makes cycling a losing proposition -- the average road trip is 15 miles in the midwest. That's 30 miles a day if you want to go by bike. And considering that over 1/3rd of our citizens are clinically obese... I don't know that even half of Americans could survive a 30 mile bike ride.
Sigh. There's so much wrong with your post it's not even funny. It's obvious you can do basic math, but what you can't seem to wrap your head around is that people aren't using 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time. It's called an oversubscription ratio, and it's typically around 250:1. Which means your "OC-48" line wouldn't support a mere 100 heavy users... it would support 25,000 heavy users. It would very probably support a quarter million normal users at a much more generous bandwidth and latency than they currently get.
Also, you seem to be laboring under the delusion that fiber optic isn't easy to upgrade. You upgrade it like this: Open rack. Push button. Remove transceiver. Screw in new one. Push button again. Close rack. Do the same thing at the other end. Done. You can take an 'OC-48' line and put in an 'OC-192' line very easily... so if you have heavy bandwidth users, you just need to replace a couple pieces of equipment.
On the other hand, coaxial cable has some very severe limitations -- you can't just open up a box somewhere and pull out a piece of equipment, a couple repeaters, and call it a day... you have to replace hundreds or thousands of devices to upgrade.
Which means fiber, once it's in the ground and run out to the customer, has a vastly lower upgrade cost. Vastly. Lower.
Dude you can do a citizen based network with good old consumer routers and gear, we did it a decade ago before the telcos lobbied to make it illegal.
Which is exactly why you need equipment that resists triangulation. And this equipment needs to be expensive. Prohibitively so. Right now, the state of the art is that UWB + rapid frequency shifting and some cryptography is really, really, difficult to triangulate. As a happy side-effect, it's also difficult to jam, and those two factors are why we have poured hundreds of millions into a unified wireless communications system for our military.
Now, we don't need that level of technology for it to be a sufficient deterrent to all but a high level organization like the NSA. And frankly, the NSA has better things to do than track down tens to hundreds of thousands of pirate radios. The goal wouldn't be to prevent detection, but just to make it so cost prohibitive that it would be impractical to shut down.
That can be done for only a few million in R&D costs... and the units themselves could be produced for about $350 apiece, lower if you can find someone to mass produce it.
Since the FCC seems to be the source of all these problems, we need to bypass them and form a wireless citizen-based infrastructure. Because the FCC won't take kindly to being shut out and unable to excercise regulatory control over it, it will have to be resistant to triangulation.
Fortunately, our military has already provided the path to this future; The communications systems onboard our stealth bombers. They use ultra wide band transmitters (UWB) and rapid frequency hopping technology on the order of around 300,000 times a second. By syncronizing a pair of PRNGs (Pseudo Random Number Generator), you can create a symbol matrix that adds +1 or -1 to the digital signal; effectively an XOR mask. The reconstructed signal can then operate at near the noise floor, and without knowing the PRNG seed, you will only get a lot of multiple-source noise -- there's no way to separate out individual very low power emissions and source them out. This is how GPS operates. Combine software defined radio with a bunch of FPGAs for front-end processing and you've got yourself a wireless digital transmitter suitable for use in a citizen-based mesh network.
Now, is unregulated wireless a good idea? No. It's a very bad idea. But if you weigh out the costs of allowing businesses to dictate terms to the FCC, who has totally lost their way with regard to their primary mission: Serving the people, with the costs of raising the noise floor by a not inconsiderable degree and potentially impacting wireless services worldwide... I think a substantial and growing minority would agree this may be the only way to solve all these problems of internet surveillance, privacy, and corporate control of most of our natural resources (which includes the EM spectrum).
If it's faithful to the original then it's going to suck. A lot.
You know, considering what a hatchet job Abrams has done to Star Trek, I'm surprised it took this long for the fans to come together and do something like this. I mean, there's Original Series, and then there's Abrahams Extra Crispy recipe... just scorched earth policy on everything you ever loved. Original is an acquired taste; It's atonement for a non-specific kind of sin. You know, you feel bad but you can't put your finger on it. Abrahams Recipe is when you have a specific sin in mind and wish to atone for it.
The fact that hundreds of pagan articles existed in the first place shows that the woo-woos were using Wikipedia like personal blogs. NOBODY CARES about your pretend religion.
Jimmy, you have an account on Slashdot. There's no need for you to post as AC anymore.
Wikipedia was run by people that equated quantity with quality.
Nope. They have started a slow burn of all articles not up to their dogmatic community standards. Witness the thousands of pages of pagan-related material that a couple editors took upon themselves to remove, and then lock the discussion pages so nobody could comment on it while doing so.
It was routine to see someone heralded as authoritative because they had made tens of thousand or more edits. In reality the only thing that shows is that someone is obsessive compulsive
Ah, but you forget the paid schills that populate Wikipedia, tirelessly updating the pages of corporations and individuals to show the most favorable things while deleting the controversial ones! There's thousands of these people who work 40 hour weeks doing this.
When wikipedia can stop ranking editors by quantity and start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility.
Quality is subjective, but quantity is an easily measured value... and it fits with their dogmatic community standards, which every month are revised to be even more removed from reality. In a few years, I fully expect them to declare fatwa on the internet and start strapping printers to their chests and charging into crowds screaming "Decency standard violation! Significance violation! REVERT! REVEEEEERRRT!" while furiously trying to spray crowds of people with white out to cover up their trivial culture.
Wikipedia still suffers from tremendous a vocal minority on certain political subjects that are locked and to prevent any viewpoint other than the vocal minority that won the right to represent their view on the given subject.
Ding. Nailed it. Wikipedia... has become the internet's bible.
Fire the fat butt-hurt dweller mods who over-moderate and reject articles for stupid subjective reasons. Unreasonable rejection is what turns people off.
Wikipedia deleted hundreds of pagan articles for lack fo relevance/popularity. There was a huge uproar in the community, but it fell on deaf ears; Many pagan religious leaders' bios were deleted of Wikipedia and the discussion pages were locked so only select and pre-approved people could comment on them -- meaning there was no way to indicate to the bigots that this wasn't just some random stub page on something nobody knew anything about, but was actually reference material used by thousands.
Ever since then, I've secretly hoped for Jimmy to get run over by a bus and wikipedia to explode in a firey ball of zero donations as people realize that the current crop of editors is enforcing their own dogmatic views on others under the guise of some 'community standards'... standards they themselves only sometimes adhere to.
Did you miss the articles about the NSA's penetration of Tor? Why would you want to use their service?
Perhaps I am less concerned with subverting a large government agency with billions to blow on such things as I am subverting a large business that makes billions on such things.
Eh, other posters have already pointed out that you're referencing high frequency trading, not algorithmic trading, so this is offtopic. Nonetheless... where exactly do you think this 1 second delay should be put in, and what would it accomplish? Make the wires "longer"; That would mean less contention for premier data centers in NYC. In one second, you can send a signal around the world five times over. But that doesn't help with the propagation of trade data from which the trades are based on; By adding all that extra lag only in terms of trade execution, but not market data, you're potentially putting billions of dollars at risk as trades are now following market data, instead of running concurrently with them. Think of it this way: You swipe your card to pay for gas. The price shown is $3.55. But when you start the pump, the price drops to $3.54. But you started the pump a second too late, so you're billed a penny more than the guy who waited a split second. Now, multiply this a few million times and suddenly you've got a market crisis. It's the same if you lag the market data but allow trades at full speed.
Let's say you put this one second latency in for both sides; trade execution and market data. How exactly do you syncronize the data when the price itself is determined by trades -- you potentially have more trades waiting to be executed than you have shares... the price is now in some kind of weird state whereby it cannot be accurate until the trades are complete, yet as the trades complete the price is trading. Now you've turned a tiny amount of speculation into a massive amount of speculation. You've made the problem a thousand times worse!
You see, no matter where you put in your "one second delay", you're reducing liquidity, increasing costs, and causing money to be lost out of the system. Your idiotic attempt to help the "little guy" has resulted in utter chaos at best, and only made it harder for him at worse!
High volume trade is just margin trading; Buying low and selling high. Now there's a lot of macroeconomic theory to go into what I say next, too much for a slashdot post, but fundamentally... the more trade there is, the more wealth there is. Lots of trades mean the market is healthy. It means money is moving... and the more money moves, the more it trades hands, the more value that money has. The only time money loses value is when it sits in an account doing nothing. It's like potential energy versus kinetic energy. You cannot harness the power of something that isn't moving.
Every time I hear about people bitch about high volume trading and "the little guy" I die a little inside; It shows a shocking lack of understanding of how markets actually operate, and how these sorts of trades benefit everyone by improving liquidity. The last economic crisis, in fact, the core of all economic crisis, is the lack of money moving. You can't invest because nothing is producing. You can't produce because nobody's investing. These kind of mexican standoffs are what lead to recessions and depressions. Liquidity is at the very heart of any boom, and its absence at the heart of every bust.
The reason why the "rich and powerful" have created a wealth gap is because money isn't trading hands. There's no trade going on -- the middle class isn't buying anything new, they're just paying off old debts. The upper class are the only ones with any liquidity, and they're holding onto money because there's nothing to invest in; If nobody's buying anything, what then is the point of investment? There's no return then. And the poor... they can't invest. They're living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck... economically, they're useless. They'll spend every dollar they're handed on the same things every day -- food, shelter, clothing, gas, rent... these things are essential to daily life, but they don't grow an economy. To get economic growth, you need people buying laptops, cars, services, luxury items.
And what started all of this? Ironically, it was a small segment of the population -- th
I'd imagine there are some pretty good reasons for that, mainly people trying to "anonymously" post searches or other things to skew metrics in their favor.
I'd imagine there's some pretty good reasons for people wanting to do anonymous internet searches too that are more important. Like getting a bullet to the head in countries like Iran, China, and North Korea.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume half of them are looking at foreign traffic and half at domestic traffic.
Bad assumption. The NSA's primary focus is foreign surveillance. It's right there in their mission statement that the tin foil hat brigade apparently has never read. The only reason they have taps on wires domestically is because much of internet travel originates, passes through, or is destined for, an IP address located outside of the US. Even the President of the United States has said as much. The NSA does gather information for domestic surveillance operations, but it's disengenuous to suggest they are providing high level analytics along with the captured data -- their role within the government is to gather intelligence, sort it, package it, and provide a deliverable intelligence product to other organizations. The NSA is basically tech support for the FBI, CIA, DHS, DEA, etc.
What makes you think you are special enough to deserve their attention?
When I was born, my mom thought I'd be President of the United States or some-such. Maybe they're just pre-emptively guarding me for my future ascention to the throne, did you consider that? :P
Personally, I'm much more concerned about the way commercial organizations are spying on us.
As am I. People yell at me on Slashdot all the time: "Why do you use Tor?! It's been compromised by the NSA!" Okay, sure... but who said I care about the NSA? I mean really guys...
Of course, there are those that worry about cops knowing when they are calling their drug supplier to set up a buy, but all indications so far is that the data is not available to regular police organizations.
Let me put the actual risk in perspective. I know someone who is on parole for a previous drug conviction. This individual regularly uses their cell phone, much of it via text messages, to arrange drug deals. So here we have an ex-felon, on parole, who is trading in Schedule I drugs on a daily basis, using what has been widely panned as the single biggest device used by the NSA to track us all... No black helicopters have come for this individual to date, and this person has been doing it for two years so far.
Guys, be glad you aren't getting all the government you're paying for. I mean it; for all this crap about government surveillance on everyone... there's a shockingly low amount of critical thinking going on about how, exactly, the government would go about doing this with its existing labor and financial resources.
Seems like a bad and unprofessional idea to just announce it's a honeypot.
Not if you're an attention whore and a wanna-be internet vigilante.
An anti-piracy stance (in the typical MPAA fashion) is a very unpopular one on the internet. There's nothing to gain.
Well, there is something to gain; it's blackmail material. That's what the MPAA/RIAA use it for, and there's no reason you couldn't sell the information to a third party to try and extort money from them "If you don't pay us to keep quiet, we'll reveal your illegal activity to the authorities." I mean, that's pretty much classic blackmail. The data he has does have value, and if you view this announcement as a bid for potential buyers of his data, then it suddenly makes sense.
The announcement is a false flag; It isn't a signal to us that he's turning the information over to authorities, it's a signal to the criminal community to come forward and begin bidding. Now instead of it being "bad and unprofessional", it's a clever way of acquiring plausible deniability by appearing to be retarded.
Sounds more like some script kiddie who is pulling some prank or what have you. But apparently tracking down who was behind was just handed to us on a silver platter, right here. Names and address included.
Not a script kiddie; a paid industry shill. And as is typical for idiot hacktivists, a simple google search without a deeper understanding of business filings reveals that it's fingering the wrong guy; They failed to check for legally registered aliases. Incomplete investigations are incompetent investigations. Hasn't the Boston Bomber Reddit Witchunt taught us anything, Internet?
You cannot conduct a proper investigation using just google. Google is exploratory not confirmatory, and if you act on this information you will likely be exposing yourself to far more legal liability than using some badly designed "honeypot" website.
Step one: Don't post on forums.
Step Two: Terrorists Win.
When you opt not to speak out against the government out of fear of reprisal, then you effectively have lost your right to free speech. Forums like Slashdot need to embrace the use of proxies like Tor, etc., instead of shutting them down with giant ugly off-red pages saying "Blocked!" Anonymization services like Tor are invaluable for creating a safe haven for free speech; in countries like Iran, North Korea, United States, France, Iraq, and Egypt, people are being harassed, arrested and imprisoned for chastizing the government for being a police state. We need websites to publish information about these governments' activities for the world to see, and sites like Slashdot that block Tor and similar technology are simply enabling those governments to build a digital iron curtain around themselves to lock down political dissent.
said to be recommending the establishment by the Government of Antigua & Barbuda of a statutory body to own, manage and operate the ultimate platform to be created for the monetisation or other exploitation of the suspension of American intellectual property rights authorised
Why does this press release read like an EULA? I mean that is a retarded amount of long words to describe a very simple idea. Why can't they just write it up as "We're bringing back fair use, bitches!"
Actually it's exactly the strategy in use on the Surface RT. Apple will at least let you install software from third party sources, the RT doesn't. Mind you Microsoft modeled this strategy after Apple's so I guess you could blame Apple.
Yes I know. I was trying to be snarky. Alas, the internet has yet to come up with the much-needed [SNARK] HTML tag.
Not when the insurance companies artificially jack up the rates for human driven cars.
They do this already for people who are stick shift instead of automatic. And if you don't get the joke, stop and brain for a minute.
We'll make the operating system and hardware completely closed ... make sure that we take away the ability to install software that hasn't been approved. We'll do this through a centralized market place where every application is signed and approved. Now the signing agency ... get a cut of 30%.
Dude, you just described Apple's marketing strategy, not Microsoft RT.
You're reading a lot into my jokey original one-sentence post. Grievance (grevance)? I've used PHP. Found it wanting. Moved on. End of story. What's driving your zealous PHP advocacy?
I'm not. It's a popular language that is also used on many major web sites. This suggests to me that your various statements about it being "found wanting" are in error. Especially when you have failed to offer an alternative. You criticized something because it was less than perfect. The exact same argument can be made for everything. Ever. It's a logical fallacy, and you got upmodded for it, and my pointing it out got me mod-bombed.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Ironic" for some posts.
I'm no troll. I was there (on the internet, not physically present) when Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web and I happened to notice while using Gopher.
I was on the internet, er, before it was the internet. -_- That doesn't mean anything as far as statements made about today.
I've spent considerable time since regretting my early advocacy and plenty of time fixing PHP driven sites or migrating away from PHP to better platforms. Plenty of other people over the years have explained why PHP is a 'fractal of bad design', so I won't make that attempt here. I agree with them.
I calmly stand by my snark, perched atop the mountain of experience.
And I stand by my statements, that PHP would be one of my top picks for back-end design and dynamic pages. It is easy to read, has reasonably good performance, and reasonable security. But no language can stop people from shooting their own foot off if they're so determined, and your grevance seems to be not with the language itself, but with the fact that so many people shoot their own foot off while using it. The only problem I have with PHP is that the designers seem utterly incapable of understanding OOP concepts and the result is half-baked objects. But then, I say the same thing about Java.
If it's personal use, why aren't you using your own computer?
Possibly because a personal laptop can do work-related activities just fine, and many in fact prefer using their own devices over what is company-issued. Nonetheless, many pieces of software allow remote monitoring regardless of who owns the equipment.
Why are you using a company phone to make a personal call? Especially in this day and age, when almost everybody has a cell phone....
Possibly because the company allows personal calls as they don't cost anything on a "everything" plan. Possibly because carrying two cell phones is inconvenient. Possibly because you are making business calls using a phone that you own and pay for but use primarily for work-related purposes. Possibly because you have purchased multiple lines for a single phone.
Companies have a right to make sure they receive the contracted services for the money they're paying you.
Actually they don't, unless the contract specifically states this. Most employment contracts do not state specific services to be provided, they only state severance clauses, and leave it to "tasks as assigned" for the work performed.
They also have a right to ensure you aren't misusing/abusing company resources.
They may take reasonable measures to protect company resources... they do not, for example, get to shoot you dead if they find you carrying a laptop out the back door. Sorry if you got confused over what a right is, and is not.
If you're on company time/using company resources, then it should be for the work they're paying you to do.
What if you're an on-call surgeon; You are being paid to be available. That does not mean you may be monitored and tracked during this time.
If your company has a policy that allows you to use company resources for personal use when you're on your own time (just as my company does -- I'm posting this while on break, from my office PC), then you have to expect that they're monitoring it.
Expectation does not create, or override, law.
Of course, I live in a country where we already have those protections. Every single one of the categories you listed has been read into the constitution and human rights/anti-discrimination legislations as protected classes of people.
I live in a country where states are allowed to pass so-called "right to work" legislation and then fire people on the basis of those things, and as long as they do not admit this as the reason for the dismissal, it is perfectly legal. So you can see where I might have a problem with some of these statements you're making; You're operating under false assumptions -- they may be true where you live, but not where I live.
Pervasive electronic monitoring is a strike against that goal.
It doesn't have to be.
There is an old latin phrase: Ad mores natura recurrit damnatos, fixa et mutari nescia . Translated, it means "human nature ever reverts to its depraved courses, fixed and immutable." You're naive if you think that if you leave the barn door open the cows won't get out. They may not make a run for the gate immediately, but they will leave, eventually. The same is true of corporations monitoring their employees -- Where there is power without restraint, there is abuse. This is human nature.
When I say we need to regulate these things, what I mean to say is we need to address the power imbalance present between employers and employees. In this country, the power imbalance is massive; Employees have no recourse for an employer that abuses them or fires them without good cause. And surveillance is a form of abuse. If you don't believe me, let me come over and sit at the foot of your bed and stare at you while you sleep. I promise... I won't do anything. I'll just sit here. Staring.
I don't see what disciplinary action has to do with being forced to pay a union for permission to work in a particular industry.
Since it's clear you haven't actually read the law, "Right to work" allows an employer to fire you for any or no reason, excepting federally-protected reasons (like sexual orientation, sex, race, etc.). It means that any employment contract signed that stipulates a mediation or resolution procedure before an employer can fire you is rendered unenforceable.
Removing right to work is a necessary first step in restoring merit-based employment decisions, instead of arbitrary ones.
... it introduced visitors to PHP.
Listen troll, PHP is used on a large number of websites, including most of the top 10. Facebook uses a special version of it. It is a solid language with a rich command set and very good performance. If you want to be a web programmer, you better know PHP.
If you wanna bash a technology commonly used by web developers, pick Flash.
How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend on a big dangerous mechanical status symbol? How many tens of thousands of dollars do you want to spend over the next decade for fuel, maintenance, and a place to store your enormous mechanical status symbol?
This is America. The answer is every penny we can. Have you SEEN our military?
The problem is our urban sprawl. It damages our health, destroys our communities, makes infrastructure impractical, and makes cars necessary. So maybe let's do something about it...?
I don't think American culture is willing to tolerate high population density living conditions, and our economy is not in any condition to begin concentrating the population either.
I mean it's not your truck, it's your boss'. It's not your computer and desk, it belongs to your boss. Etc etc.
It's the companies laptop. In your home.
It's the company's truck. After hours.
It's the company's phone. On a private call.
Misuse of this technology can and will affect employee morale rather sharply.
Right. Because nobody who's morale dropped enough to complain was disciplined. Anywhere. Ever.
I'm sorry, but this is a classic example of where government regulation is needed. Companies have the privilege (not right!) of monitoring their employees. Just like your driver's license isn't a right to drive: It can be revoked. Employers need to be held accountable for overstepping boundaries of reasonableness.
Go ahead and record e-mails, but if it doesn't directly affect the business it should be deleted and no further comment made. Direct managers should be prevented from monitoring their employees electronically -- instead a separate department such as HR should do this, so as to prevent bias. Phone calls should not be monitored once the employee is off the clock. If they have a problem with this, remotely disable the phone at the appointed time. Same with computers with internet access, and other dual-use devices. Keep in mind many people use their personal phone for work-related calls, and likewise with laptops and other electronic devices. Remote evesdropping when you are not actively engaged in company business should be prohibited.
And to seal the deal, we need federal legislation to drop the ban-hammer on so-called "right to work" state legislation; The laws should be written so only conduct which directly impacts the company, while using company resources, can be subject to disciplinary action. In other words, if you don't like JP Morgan's shady business strategies (which led to the subprime mortgage crisis), you should be free to protest on your own time without fear of reprisal.
We need to draw a line that says only conduct that happens on company time or using company resources is subject to any disciplinary action. We need to prohibit employers from taking action against employers punitively on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identification, etc. And this is not just about protecting "the little guy"; This is about protecting the country as a whole.
Merit-based employment and strong non-discrimination policies provide a direct and immediate benefit to society by making as many jobs available to as many qualified candidates as possible. It increases labor supply, and rewards companies who hire on the basis of merit with a more competitive and efficient labor force.
Pervasive electronic monitoring is a strike against that goal. I will tell you, being on the other side of the IT version of the 'one-way' glass, that if you watch anyone long enough, you'll find a reason to hate them. You will become judgmental, and you will look at them differently. Which is precisely why managers should never under any circumstances be allowed to covertly monitor their employees. There is no "if" about morale suffering; It starts deteriorating the moment you start.
And managers are notoriously short-sighted, poor judges of character, and often blow things radically out of proportion when they do come across something hinky. Just like the general public did during the hunt for the boston bomber. People who are not trained and experienced in surveillance, who are not impartial to the people being watched, should never, ever, ever be given the reins. Disaster is most often the result.
Only? That sounds like proof of concept rather than a proof of overstatement.
It is only proof that America as a whole, of which NYC is a part of (contrary to popular opinion, who think it is America), has a shockingly low regard for bikers. Take for example, how the Dutch handle bicycling -- they have not just dedicated lanes, but dedicated traffic signals. Bikes are an integrated part of their public transportation system. In the United States, it's viewed as "something children do, or people who haven't grown up." In other words, you're viewed as immature and/or poor if you ride a bike, not environmentally conscious, fiscally prudent, or body smart.
Now I live in the midwest, and several of our cities, to little fanfare, have been adopting the dutch approach. In Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities, we are creating dedicated bike lanes and signals. Minneapolis in particular has an extensive network of inter-city bike trails which it maintains year round. For those who forget, Minneapolis is located at the same lat/long as Moscow, and it regularly gets snowfall of several feet come high winter. Chicago's trains have been installing bike racks in the cars and on buses, though they are seen less than elsewhere during the cold season. New York, for all its bluster about this, barely registers on the scale of bike-friendliness; cyclists there might as well be armed mad-max style and shooting at motorists for as much hostility there is between the two groups, whereas in the midwest, and even along the West coast in places like San Francisco, motorists are much more tolerant of cyclists.
This is starting to change as the millenials come into the workforce and seem decidedly uninterested in owning their own car. I'm not entirely sure why this is happening, because unlike Europe, the population density of America is such that owning a car is pretty much a necessity -- most people who own bikes also own, or at least have access to, a car or other form of motorized transportation. Even in Europe, scooters are a common sight, whereas around here, they're rare indeed.
I guess my point is that while culture plays a role, the bigger hinderance to mass transit and cycling both in the United States is population density. We are really spread out. You could fit several Western Europes into the US, and we don't have nearly as many people per mile as most European countries. The other part of this is that our city's infrastructure has never been flat out replaced. Europe's has -- it was called WWII, when most of their infrastructure was blown up. Your welcome by the way -- we paid for fixing a lot of that. We've never done the same here -- our roads were never reimagined to include bikes, or mini-vehicles, etc. Our urban sprawl continues unabated. And this is, ultimately, why we have so many problems; We're too spread out, and infrastructure costs too damn much, which is why it's only basic. We should have had bullet trains and such a long time ago; But the maintenance costs of all this suburban landscape saps away our budget. And it makes cycling a losing proposition -- the average road trip is 15 miles in the midwest. That's 30 miles a day if you want to go by bike. And considering that over 1/3rd of our citizens are clinically obese... I don't know that even half of Americans could survive a 30 mile bike ride.
Sigh. There's so much wrong with your post it's not even funny. It's obvious you can do basic math, but what you can't seem to wrap your head around is that people aren't using 100% of the bandwidth 100% of the time. It's called an oversubscription ratio, and it's typically around 250:1. Which means your "OC-48" line wouldn't support a mere 100 heavy users... it would support 25,000 heavy users. It would very probably support a quarter million normal users at a much more generous bandwidth and latency than they currently get.
Also, you seem to be laboring under the delusion that fiber optic isn't easy to upgrade. You upgrade it like this: Open rack. Push button. Remove transceiver. Screw in new one. Push button again. Close rack. Do the same thing at the other end. Done. You can take an 'OC-48' line and put in an 'OC-192' line very easily... so if you have heavy bandwidth users, you just need to replace a couple pieces of equipment.
On the other hand, coaxial cable has some very severe limitations -- you can't just open up a box somewhere and pull out a piece of equipment, a couple repeaters, and call it a day... you have to replace hundreds or thousands of devices to upgrade.
Which means fiber, once it's in the ground and run out to the customer, has a vastly lower upgrade cost. Vastly. Lower.
Dude you can do a citizen based network with good old consumer routers and gear, we did it a decade ago before the telcos lobbied to make it illegal.
Which is exactly why you need equipment that resists triangulation. And this equipment needs to be expensive. Prohibitively so. Right now, the state of the art is that UWB + rapid frequency shifting and some cryptography is really, really, difficult to triangulate. As a happy side-effect, it's also difficult to jam, and those two factors are why we have poured hundreds of millions into a unified wireless communications system for our military.
Now, we don't need that level of technology for it to be a sufficient deterrent to all but a high level organization like the NSA. And frankly, the NSA has better things to do than track down tens to hundreds of thousands of pirate radios. The goal wouldn't be to prevent detection, but just to make it so cost prohibitive that it would be impractical to shut down.
That can be done for only a few million in R&D costs... and the units themselves could be produced for about $350 apiece, lower if you can find someone to mass produce it.
I'd say the monopolies need to end.
Since the FCC seems to be the source of all these problems, we need to bypass them and form a wireless citizen-based infrastructure. Because the FCC won't take kindly to being shut out and unable to excercise regulatory control over it, it will have to be resistant to triangulation.
Fortunately, our military has already provided the path to this future; The communications systems onboard our stealth bombers. They use ultra wide band transmitters (UWB) and rapid frequency hopping technology on the order of around 300,000 times a second. By syncronizing a pair of PRNGs (Pseudo Random Number Generator), you can create a symbol matrix that adds +1 or -1 to the digital signal; effectively an XOR mask. The reconstructed signal can then operate at near the noise floor, and without knowing the PRNG seed, you will only get a lot of multiple-source noise -- there's no way to separate out individual very low power emissions and source them out. This is how GPS operates. Combine software defined radio with a bunch of FPGAs for front-end processing and you've got yourself a wireless digital transmitter suitable for use in a citizen-based mesh network.
Now, is unregulated wireless a good idea? No. It's a very bad idea. But if you weigh out the costs of allowing businesses to dictate terms to the FCC, who has totally lost their way with regard to their primary mission: Serving the people, with the costs of raising the noise floor by a not inconsiderable degree and potentially impacting wireless services worldwide... I think a substantial and growing minority would agree this may be the only way to solve all these problems of internet surveillance, privacy, and corporate control of most of our natural resources (which includes the EM spectrum).
If it's faithful to the original then it's going to suck. A lot.
You know, considering what a hatchet job Abrams has done to Star Trek, I'm surprised it took this long for the fans to come together and do something like this. I mean, there's Original Series, and then there's Abrahams Extra Crispy recipe... just scorched earth policy on everything you ever loved. Original is an acquired taste; It's atonement for a non-specific kind of sin. You know, you feel bad but you can't put your finger on it. Abrahams Recipe is when you have a specific sin in mind and wish to atone for it.
The fact that hundreds of pagan articles existed in the first place shows that the woo-woos were using Wikipedia like personal blogs. NOBODY CARES about your pretend religion.
Jimmy, you have an account on Slashdot. There's no need for you to post as AC anymore.
Wikipedia was run by people that equated quantity with quality.
Nope. They have started a slow burn of all articles not up to their dogmatic community standards. Witness the thousands of pages of pagan-related material that a couple editors took upon themselves to remove, and then lock the discussion pages so nobody could comment on it while doing so.
It was routine to see someone heralded as authoritative because they had made tens of thousand or more edits. In reality the only thing that shows is that someone is obsessive compulsive
Ah, but you forget the paid schills that populate Wikipedia, tirelessly updating the pages of corporations and individuals to show the most favorable things while deleting the controversial ones! There's thousands of these people who work 40 hour weeks doing this.
When wikipedia can stop ranking editors by quantity and start ranking editors by quality the entire site will gain credibility.
Quality is subjective, but quantity is an easily measured value... and it fits with their dogmatic community standards, which every month are revised to be even more removed from reality. In a few years, I fully expect them to declare fatwa on the internet and start strapping printers to their chests and charging into crowds screaming "Decency standard violation! Significance violation! REVERT! REVEEEEERRRT!" while furiously trying to spray crowds of people with white out to cover up their trivial culture.
Wikipedia still suffers from tremendous a vocal minority on certain political subjects that are locked and to prevent any viewpoint other than the vocal minority that won the right to represent their view on the given subject.
Ding. Nailed it. Wikipedia... has become the internet's bible.
Fire the fat butt-hurt dweller mods who over-moderate and reject articles for stupid subjective reasons. Unreasonable rejection is what turns people off.
Wikipedia deleted hundreds of pagan articles for lack fo relevance/popularity. There was a huge uproar in the community, but it fell on deaf ears; Many pagan religious leaders' bios were deleted of Wikipedia and the discussion pages were locked so only select and pre-approved people could comment on them -- meaning there was no way to indicate to the bigots that this wasn't just some random stub page on something nobody knew anything about, but was actually reference material used by thousands.
Ever since then, I've secretly hoped for Jimmy to get run over by a bus and wikipedia to explode in a firey ball of zero donations as people realize that the current crop of editors is enforcing their own dogmatic views on others under the guise of some 'community standards'... standards they themselves only sometimes adhere to.
Did you miss the articles about the NSA's penetration of Tor? Why would you want to use their service?
Perhaps I am less concerned with subverting a large government agency with billions to blow on such things as I am subverting a large business that makes billions on such things.
Eh, other posters have already pointed out that you're referencing high frequency trading, not algorithmic trading, so this is offtopic. Nonetheless... where exactly do you think this 1 second delay should be put in, and what would it accomplish? Make the wires "longer"; That would mean less contention for premier data centers in NYC. In one second, you can send a signal around the world five times over. But that doesn't help with the propagation of trade data from which the trades are based on; By adding all that extra lag only in terms of trade execution, but not market data, you're potentially putting billions of dollars at risk as trades are now following market data, instead of running concurrently with them. Think of it this way: You swipe your card to pay for gas. The price shown is $3.55. But when you start the pump, the price drops to $3.54. But you started the pump a second too late, so you're billed a penny more than the guy who waited a split second. Now, multiply this a few million times and suddenly you've got a market crisis. It's the same if you lag the market data but allow trades at full speed.
Let's say you put this one second latency in for both sides; trade execution and market data. How exactly do you syncronize the data when the price itself is determined by trades -- you potentially have more trades waiting to be executed than you have shares... the price is now in some kind of weird state whereby it cannot be accurate until the trades are complete, yet as the trades complete the price is trading. Now you've turned a tiny amount of speculation into a massive amount of speculation. You've made the problem a thousand times worse!
You see, no matter where you put in your "one second delay", you're reducing liquidity, increasing costs, and causing money to be lost out of the system. Your idiotic attempt to help the "little guy" has resulted in utter chaos at best, and only made it harder for him at worse!
High volume trade is just margin trading; Buying low and selling high. Now there's a lot of macroeconomic theory to go into what I say next, too much for a slashdot post, but fundamentally... the more trade there is, the more wealth there is. Lots of trades mean the market is healthy. It means money is moving... and the more money moves, the more it trades hands, the more value that money has. The only time money loses value is when it sits in an account doing nothing. It's like potential energy versus kinetic energy. You cannot harness the power of something that isn't moving.
Every time I hear about people bitch about high volume trading and "the little guy" I die a little inside; It shows a shocking lack of understanding of how markets actually operate, and how these sorts of trades benefit everyone by improving liquidity. The last economic crisis, in fact, the core of all economic crisis, is the lack of money moving. You can't invest because nothing is producing. You can't produce because nobody's investing. These kind of mexican standoffs are what lead to recessions and depressions. Liquidity is at the very heart of any boom, and its absence at the heart of every bust.
The reason why the "rich and powerful" have created a wealth gap is because money isn't trading hands. There's no trade going on -- the middle class isn't buying anything new, they're just paying off old debts. The upper class are the only ones with any liquidity, and they're holding onto money because there's nothing to invest in; If nobody's buying anything, what then is the point of investment? There's no return then. And the poor... they can't invest. They're living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck... economically, they're useless. They'll spend every dollar they're handed on the same things every day -- food, shelter, clothing, gas, rent... these things are essential to daily life, but they don't grow an economy. To get economic growth, you need people buying laptops, cars, services, luxury items.
And what started all of this? Ironically, it was a small segment of the population -- th
I'd imagine there are some pretty good reasons for that, mainly people trying to "anonymously" post searches or other things to skew metrics in their favor.
I'd imagine there's some pretty good reasons for people wanting to do anonymous internet searches too that are more important. Like getting a bullet to the head in countries like Iran, China, and North Korea.